Davies skims over the how-to details but does discuss the future implications of “genomics” for medicine, anthropology,...
A reprise of the saga to map and sequence the human genome by the savvy founding editor of Nature Genetics.
Davies spotlights the role of J. Craig Venter, whose private firm Celera was both goad and thorn in the flesh to the federal Human Genome Project, headed by Francis Collins. HGP was a collaborative enterprise involving major labs in the US, UK, and other leading countries, with agreed-upon rules against patenting human genes and requiring the release of all sequence data to the public. Celera, billed as an information corporation, agreed to release data quarterly and seek patents on only a few hundred “novel gene systems.” The bone of contention between Venter and Collins lay in their radically different approaches to gene sequencing. The HGP program aimed to map the genome first, and only afterwards to clone and sequence it. Venter’s approach was “shotgun”—blast the whole DNA molecule into myriad fragments and use high-powered sequencing machines to read off the bases, then reassemble the bits and pieces using a sophisticated computer program. This approach, added to Venter’s earlier disputed techniques while still an NIH scientist, outraged the old guard and their disciples—but they were proved wrong when Venter completed the sequencing of the genome of a disease bacterium and a fruit fly. The author chronicles the rage and fear that colored the contenders in what clearly became a race, egged on by the media. In the end, it was the intervention of more than one behind-the-scenes senior scientist and public official that led to a “tie” in the race: a joint announcement this year at the White House that the feds and private enterprise had together forged a working draft of the human genome.
Davies skims over the how-to details but does discuss the future implications of “genomics” for medicine, anthropology, ethics, and evolution. His forte, however, lies in his admirable narration of how science and scientists work in the real world—and what a debt is owed to technology.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-0479-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
The origins of humankind have inspired endless speculation in myth, religion, philosophy, and science. In this scholarly volume, Portuguese developmental biologist Pinto-Correia elaborates on the history of one theory. From the mid-17th to the mid-18th centuries, battle lines were drawn between preformationists, who believed that all mankind was conceived in the ovary of Eve, and epigeneticists, who believed that development began de novo in each egg. Within the first camp there was further division between ovists, who believed future generations were encased within the egg like a series of ever-shrinking Russian dolls, and spermists, who saw a similar series of minipersons in the sperm head. Pinto-Correia's point is that the preformationists have gotten short shrift in the historical record, their ideas ridiculed and caricatured. But, she says, you can read today's homage to the genome as preformation reconfigured in the form of the idea that it's all written in the genes. Many will question that conclusion, however: Today's epigeneticists point to complex gene-environment interactions in development. In all fairness, the volume covers much more than an arcane chapter in the history of embryology. There are fascinating details on the evolution of thought in Harvey, Leeuwenhoek, Spallanzani (who preceded Pasteur in showing that spontaneous generation didn't exist), and numerous others. Many were skilled microscopists and experimental scientists who nevertheless reconciled what their eyes saw with what their soul believed. Pinto-Correia also elaborates on the denigration of women that colored many arguments, the importance of measurement and numerology (you could figure out how many Russian dolls you'd need, given that the universe was only 6,000 years old), and so on. (Stephen Jay Gould contributes a foreword.) In short, there is a rich meal to dine on—not to be swallowed at one sitting—but perhaps to inspire other scholar/chefs to stew about. (55 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-226-66952-1
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
A lucid and lively survey of Victorian explorers from Raby (English/Homerton College, Cambridge). ``For the English in the nineteenth century, abroad, and especially the Empire and the colonies, existed to bring things back from,'' notes Raby in a neat introductory capsulization. Bring things back they did, to a fare-thee-well, but they were also, the author makes clear, agents in the imperial juggernaut, ``part of a slow but inexorable process of domination and annexation.'' Opening the world to commerce may have been the end result, yet each of the venturers heard his or her own drummer and fashioned an inimitable style afield. Raby profiles Mungo Park, Richard Lander, and Heinrich Barth on their African sorties; Joseph Hooker's plant collecting in India and the mountain kingdoms to the north; Charles Darwin's monumental classification undertakings while being ferried about on the Beagle; the scientific entrepreneurs Henry Walter Bates, Alfred Wallace, and Richrad Spruce, who traded in beetles (a Victorian fancy), birds, and dried plants (though it is odd that Raby makes no mention here of the recent biopiracy controversies, particularly with Spruce, whose cinchona and rubber gatherings are a hot topic). And as women explorers have been given short shrift for their contibutions, Raby takes pains to chronicle the work of Mary Kingsley in West Africa and Marianne North's superb botanical artwork. Raby then turns his attentions to how the jottings of these explorers were appropriated and deployed by writers as diverse as Charles Kingsley, whose Water Babies Raby considers ``a coded tour round the scientific debates of the mid-century,'' and Samuel Burler in his utopian Erewhon, the romantic Rider Haggard, son-of-the-manse John Buchan, Dickens in Bleak House, and, of course, Conrad. Importantly, Raby shows how the works of the explorers shaped a new Darwinian and colonialist worldview, one that remains mighty influential in the modern imagination. (8 pages illustrations and maps)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-691-04843-6
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
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