Craig Venter, Francis Collins, James Watson, and the Story of the Greatest Scientific Discovery of Our Time.
In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double helix structure of DNA. The discovery was a profound, Nobel Prize-winning moment in the history of genetics, but it did not decipher the messages on the twisted, ladderlike strands within our cells. No one knew what the human genome sequence actually was. No one had cracked the code of life. Now, at the beginning of a new millennium, that code has been cracked.
Kevin Davies, founding editor of the leading journal in the field, 'Nature Genetics', has relentlessly followed the story as it unfolded, week by week, for ten years. Here for the first time, in rich human, scientific, and financial detail, is the dramatic story of one of the greatest scientific feats ever accomplished: the mapping of the human genome.
Davies captures the drama of this momentous achievement, drawing on his own genetics expertise and interviews with scientists including maverick DNA sequencer, J Craig Venter, and medical geneticist Francis Collins, as well as Eric Lander, an MIT computer wizard who refers to the public genome project as "the forces of good"; Kari Stefansson, the genetics entrepreneur who is remaking Iceland's economy; and John Sulston, chief of the UK genome project, who led the charge against gene patenting.
Davies has visited geneticists around the world to illustrate a vast international enterprise working on the frontier of human knowledge. This book is the definitive account of the how the code that holds the answers to the origin of life, the evolution of humanity, and the future of medicine was broken.
