CRISPR: A Powerful Way to Change DNA

She played with it for awhile and decided to study law. 😂

Presenting cutting-edge information on genetic engineering is tough enough to do for an informed adult audience. To write an engaging book on the topic for children is twice as hard. With CRISPR: A Powerful Way to Change DNA, Yolanda Ridge strikes the right balance between explaining the complex and telling the simple story of how genetic research is going to impact our lives well into the future. It’s a book everyone should read because who knows, you may find a woolly Mammoth in your backyard one day.

I think there would be better books out there on the subject. I would have liked more depth with this book. It felt like it was written for teenagers.

My kid enjoyed reading it. Learned a lot.

Great tie in and deep dive for kids wanting to understand today’s world. CRISPR is being used for COVID vaccine research. Love a well-written, accessible nonfiction for tweens and teens.

great book to explain the procedure

This was a great introduction to CRISPR and genetic modification. I’m actually working towards getting a minor in genetics, so I thought this book would be right up my alley. It was certainly an educational read, but wasn’t quite what I was looking for. I found myself reading sentences like “It’s just the result of those other genes doing their thing,” which left me wondering exactly what those other genes were and what they are doing. The childish simplification of mRNA to “The workers inside the cell” and comparisons between the human genome and “toy bricks“ further led me to believe this book would be better suited to middle and high school students. That being said, this book is a great introduction to CRISPR and the ethical dilemma surrounding genetic modification. This was also a relatively quick read, and I’m impressed Yolanda Ridge was able to pack so much into so few pages. I definitely think this is a worthwhile introduction to genetics, but it doesn’t cover much beyond that.I voluntarily read and reviewed an ARC of this book from Netgalley and Annick Press. Opinions are my own.

This is a young adult nonfiction book about the newest cutting edge science topic - CRISPR. By using CRISPR, scientists can change DNA, our genetic code, relatively easily and permanently, in some cases even down through the generations. The question explored here...should we? The book is nicely organized, beginning with a quick biology lesson, followed by a brief explanation of CRISPR, leading into various uses for the process, including humans. Each chapter ends by asking valid questions of the reader, leading to worthwhile discussions. The book concludes with a long list of sources, an index, and a list of further reading suggestions.Although the focus is YA, the smooth, basic, easy-to-understand writing will also help adults understand the concepts. I can see this book being used in middle and high school science classes as well as adult book clubs.The formatting was not perfect and the illustrations seemed to jump around, but that could have been from the ebook ARC that I was reading. A print format will probably work better for this excellent book. Thanks to NetGalley and Annick Press for providing an ARC.