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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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