CRACKING THE GENOME --- INSIDE THE RACE TO UNLOCK HUMAN DNA --- CRAIG VENTER, FRANCIS COLLINS, JAMES WATSON, AND THE STORY OF HE GREATEST SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY OF OUR TIME by Kevin Davies. The Free Press, 2001
DNA QUOTES OF WISDOM
"The double helix is indeed a remarkable molecule. Modern man is perhaps 50,000 years old, civilization has existed for scarcely 10,000 years and the United States for only just over 200 years; but DNA and RNA have been around for at least several billion years. All that time the double helix has been there, and active, and yet we are the first creatures on Earth to become aware of its existence." by Francis Crick (pvii)
"The sequence is only the beginning." by J. Craig Venter (pix)
"We are digital archives of the African Pliocene, even of Devonian sease; walking repositories of wisdom out of the old days. You could spend a lifetime reading in this ancient library and die unsated by the wonder of it." by Richard Dawkins (p1)
INTRODUCTION (p1-10)
1) Knights of the Double Helix (p11-32)
The quest for biology's Holy Grail
2) Reading the "Book of Life (p33-51)
A quick voyage around the "Human Genome"
3) The eye of the "TIGR" (p52-68)
J. Craig Venter --- Maverick sequencer
4) Loading the bases (p69-93)
Francis Collins and the DNA detectives
5) The "Circle of Life" (p94-118)
Decoding the first "free-living" creatures
6) Treasures of the Lost Worlds (p119-140)
The keys to human disease from Tristan da Cunha to Iceland
7) Prize fight (p141-168)
The creation of Celera Genomics
8) The story of us (p169-191)
The secrets of who we are
9) The "Croesus Code" (p192-215)
Passion, personality, and profit
10) The "Eighth Day" (p216-235)
Braving the new world of designer genes
11) The "Language of God" (p236-252)
A defining moment in the history of the human race
The generation of the complete "genome sequence" has been the greatest adventure in modern science. It has been propelled by the commitment of many remarkable men and women.
They have redeemed an unwieldy multinational project to produce a working draft of the sequence. In the next few years, this will be polished to produce the gold-standard Human Genome Sequence, which will be a reference for the rest of time!
In his classic novel, 1984, George Orwell wrote:
"All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as necessry."
(A "palimpsest" is a text that has been erased and overwritten.)
The Genome Sequence can be considered a genetic palimpsest, a text that has been overwritten time and again by evolution. Buried in this sequence, once scientists have developed sufficiently sophisticasted tools and computer programs to unearth them, are the answers to the origins of life, the evolution of humanity, and the future of medicine.
NOTES (p253-296)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (p297-298)
INDEX (p299-310)
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