Despite an often heavy burden of technical details, the personalities and machinations involved in Big Science make this an...
The accomplished Venter, whose race to be the first to sequence the human genome made him a controversial figure, offers an engaging, albeit self-serving, story of his life and scientific achievements.
In keeping with the book’s subtitle, and challenging the notion that genes are destiny, sidebars throughout the book explore the possible implications of portions of Venter’s own genome. Most accessible are his accounts of growing up in California, where a bent for risk-taking and building things foreshadowed his later career, and of his time as a Navy medic in Vietnam, where a new-found interest in medicine sent the former near-dropout on to college and an eventual Ph.D. in biochemistry. It was also in Vietnam that Venter began his love affair with sailing, a passion he would carry throughout his life. The book becomes denser as Venter writes about his scientific work, first as a graduate student, then on the faculty at the State University of New York at Buffalo and later at the National Institutes of Health. It was at the NIH that he developed a new strategy for sequencing genes and encountered the intense politics, lobbying and maneuvering that plagued the genome effort. Neither James Watson nor his successor as head of the government’s Human Genome Project, Francis Collins, receive flattering portraits, and neither do certain business figures with whom Venter formed alliances when the NIH refused to fund his ideas for gene sequencing. In 1992, with commercial backing, he formed The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), which successfully sequenced the first genome of a living organism. In 1998, upon becoming president of Celera Genomics, he announced that his group would sequence the entire humane genome faster and cheaper than the government-run project by using automated DNA sequencing machines and new mathematical algorithms. In 2001, the results were published in Science, but in 2002 tensions between Venter and his financial backer forced him out as Celera’s president. Today he heads the J. Craig Venter Institute, a genomic-focused not-for-profit research center that is trolling the ocean to capture the DNA of its microbial life and experimenting with biological techniques for producing hydrogen and reducing carbon dioxide.
Despite an often heavy burden of technical details, the personalities and machinations involved in Big Science make this an engaging read.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-670-06358-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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