Dimensions
170 x 240 x 30mm
History rarely grants us front-row seats for a wold-transforming event. Those who witnessed live coverage of Apollo 13's lunar landing will never forget Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon. It is fitting, then, that last year's successful completion of the Human Genome Project - the international billion-dollar quest to sequence our genetic make-up - is being compared in historic importance, to the Apollo missions.
This book is the definitive inside account of this event. Beyond the headlines and the innumerable news accounts around the world lies the compelling story of the race between the official government-sponsored project led by the brilliant geneticist Francis Collins, and a renegade biotech company founded by the entrepreneur J Craig Venter. It is a story in which science, politics, business and society meet head on.
When the Human Genome Project, a 15-year joint project between the US and UK governments, was launched in 1990, it was inconceivable that anyone else would have the technology, the expertise or the financial resources to even enter there race, let alone win it. In 1998, a brash scientist, millionaire and world-class yachtsman named Craig Venter announced that his company, Celera, would use high-powered sequencing machines to complete the sequence from scratch in three years.
Told in riveting detail, this book takes the reader into the labs and lives of these and other researchers who last year made arguably the biggest scientific breakthrough of all time. Regardless of whom the history books eventually decide "won" the race, the stakes are staggering. From fertility clinics, where embryos are screened for disease genes before implantation, to the courtroom, where the rights to patent and use genetic information will be fought, this book explores the profound implications of a discovery that will revolutionise all our lives.
