The Common Thread [Import] [Hardcover]

GEORGINA FERRY JOHN SULSTON (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: BANTAM PRESS (2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0593048016
• ISBN-13: 978-0593048016
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,042,191 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Good Guys Win! We All Win!, October 17, 2002

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Common Thread: A Story of Science, Politics, Ethics and the Human Genome (Hardcover)

When James Watson wrote the wonderful _The Double Helix_ in 1968, many of his scientific colleagues were scandalized, even though it was about how Watson and Francis Crick had fifteen years before discovered the structure of DNA. It was perceived as unseemly to admit that they were racing other labs for the goal. Nowadays, that's simply the way science is done in many cases. It can have lamentable effects; the rush to get the research about "cold fusion" into print meant that other researchers did not have the chance to check the credibility of the experiments, and science as a whole suffered. In the case of the Human Genome Project, the effort to find the three billion letters in the human DNA recipe, it was a race from the start. In a book that will remind many of Watson's chronicle, _The Common Thread: A Story of Science, Politics, and the Human Genome_ (Joseph Henry Press), John Sulston, who led the British team on the project, joins with Georgina Ferry, a science writer, to tell how the race was won, and by the good guys.

It won't surprise anyone that Sulston himself is a good guy in his own memoir. Sulston and those who worked with him campaigned for money for their efforts, to be sure, but they were committed to making any data they uncovered public. In the other corner was Celera, a private company headed by Craig Venter, a former public scientist who, as head of a private firm, understandably did whatever he could to ensure the profitability of that firm. It was Celera's intention to map the genome, sell its data to those who wanted it, and patent genes. Venter's publicity material hinted that there was slack and inefficiency among the project scientists at the public trough, and he invited them simply to stand down and get out of the way while he finished it up, and incidentally while he made millions from whoever wanted to use the data he uncovered. Sulston had to speak out against the commercialization of the effort, and this put him squarely against those in America who think that commercial efficiency has every advantage against government stagnation. The resultant public relations battle is fascinating; Venter was good at it, and the public and politicians early became convinced that public ownership meant little. At one point Sulston says bitterly, "Once a particular point of view has taken hold in the public imagination, it's extremely hard to offset it. The only recourse is to compete on the PR front in the first place. I find that a profoundly depressing thought. Is it a fantasy that simply being honest will in the end be powerful enough?"

This is a great story, one that will be mined in the future by historians of the epochal Human Genome Project. The book is not a good text on molecular genetics, or even the specifics of sequencing which are the science part of the story, but it is a splendid discussion of how science is done nowadays. (The "beer-fuelled discussions" between participants are recounted, as well as possible, in their place.) The difficult aspects of the struggle between public science and private science get a thorough and thoughtful history here. Read this account and rejoice in a big win for humanity and the common good over profits, this time.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A private account of a very public milestone, July 4, 2003

By 

PAUL FARRINGTON (ENGLAND, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Common Thread: A Story of Science, Politics, Ethics and the Human Genome (Hardcover)

This is a chronologically written, biographically styled account of the race to sequence the human genome. This book is co-authored by an English scientist who finds himself drawn into an increasingly political battle, both to beat the private sector to completion and to defend the genetic information gleaned from falling under commercial patents. He casts Celera Genomics' Craig Venter (the private sector competitor) as the villain in this account. I suspect there are many more sides to this story (Venter himself gives wounded rebuttals aplenty in subsequent interviews). How passionately you agree with Sulston's own conclusions depends very much on your opinion of private sector bioscience and how biological information should be subject to intellectual property rights. If the decoding of the human genome interests you, this public sector account of what happened should clarify and colour the picture. A small criticism: The different methods of cloning, mapping and sequencing are complicated stuff and key to understanding how this story unfolds - the non-technical reader could benefit from a basic glossary of technical terms.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sulston thoroughly criticizes the Venter's shotgun approach, January 23, 2005

By 

Sei Kameoka (New Hampshire, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Common Thread: A Story of Science, Politics, Ethics and the Human Genome (Hardcover)

The book has 280 pages of text, 8 pages of INDEX (very detail), 7 pages of photographs. I think some conceptual figures would greatly help the lay readers to understand what the shotgun approaches is, but no figures or table included unfortunately. The most important conclusion of the book is, written in page 240, "Eric Lander, Richard Durbin and Phil Green all independently analyzed the information and came to similar conclusions. There was no evidence in the paper that the whole-genome assembly had worked adequately."

However, Sulston never explains the fact that even if the shotgun approach leaves the "gap", it may not be the critical problem for the purpose of drug candidate search. His sponsor/customer - the big pharmaceutical companies wanted to pursue this specific aim for the lowest and fastest cost.

Sulston vehemently criticize the Sciences' editor-in-chief Don Kennedy for the unethical practice of accepting Celera Paper. I wish I could hear more about the Kennedy's side of the story. Considering many US scientists are running or advising their own company (Eric Lander himself is the founder of Millennium Pharmaceuticals), there seem to be a conceptual schism between US and UK scientists toward the issue.