A Best Book of 2021 by Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Time, and The Washington Post The bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs returns with a “compelling” (The Washington Post) account of how Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues launched a revolution that will allow us to cure diseases, fend off viruses, and have healthier babies. When Jennifer Doudna was in sixth grade, she came home one day to find that her dad had left a paperback titled The Double Helix on her bed. She put it aside, thinking it was one of those detective tales she loved. When she read it on a rainy Saturday, she discovered she was right, in a way. As she sped through the pages, she became enthralled by the intense drama behind the competition to discover the code of life. Even though her high school counselor told her girls didn’t become scientists, she decided she would. Driven by a passion to understand how nature works and to turn discoveries into inventions, she would help to make what the book’s author, James Watson, told her was the most important biological advance since his codiscovery of the structure of DNA. She and her collaborators turned a curiosity of nature into an invention that will transform the human race: an easy-to-use tool that can edit DNA. Known as CRISPR, it opened a brave new world of medical miracles and moral questions. The development of CRISPR and the race to create vaccines for coronavirus will hasten our transition to the next great innovation revolution. The past half-century has been a digital age, based on the microchip, computer, and internet. Now we are entering a life-science revolution. Children who study digital coding will be joined by those who study genetic code. Should we use our new evolution-hacking powers to make us less susceptible to viruses? What a wonderful boon that would be! And what about preventing depression? Hmmm…Should we allow parents, if they can afford it, to enhance the height or muscles or IQ of their kids? After helping to discover CRISPR, Doudna became a leader in wrestling with these moral issues and, with her collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the Nobel Prize in 2020. Her story is an “enthralling detective story” (Oprah Daily) that involves the most profound wonders of nature, from the origins of life to the future of our species.

This reference work on Spin in Organics contains four volumes dedicated to spin injection, spin transport, spin pumping, organic magnetic field effect, and molecular spintronics. The field of Organic Spintronics has accelerated and matured in the last dozen years with the realization of an organic spin-valve (in 2004) and magneto-resistance and magneto-electroluminescence in organic optoelectronic devices (2006).The book series is comprehensive in that it summarizes all aspects of Organic Spintronics to date. The first two volumes deal with spin injection, spin transport, spin manipulation and spin pumping into organic semiconductors. The main device that is thoroughly discussed here is the organic spin-valve, where spinterface states at the interface between the organic semiconductor and the ferromagnetic (FM) electrode has been the focus of many chapters. An interesting emerging subject is the role of chirality in the organic layer of the device. A relatively new method of achieving spin aligned carriers in organic semiconductors is spin pumping, where magnons in the FM substrate generate spin aligned carriers in the organic layer at the FM/organic interface.The third volume deals mainly with magnetic field effect in organic devices. Several spin-mixture processes that lead to magnetic field effect in devices and films are thoroughly discussed, such as hyperfine interaction, direct spin-orbit coupling, indirect spin-orbit coupling via Δg, triplet-triplet annihilation, and thermal spin alignment. The similarity between the magnetic field effect obtained in optoelectronic devices based on organic semiconductors and the novel hybrid organic-inorganic semiconductors is also a subject of intense interest. The fourth volume deals with spin in molecular films and devices. It includes thorough discussion of spin exchange interaction that leads to organic ferromagnets, as well as manifestation of various spin interactions in thin molecular films and devices.