Customer Reviews

A Genetic Switch: Phage Lambda Revisited

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I found out about this unassuming little book in Sean Carroll's
"Endless forms most beautiful" and was delighted. When I first started reading it, a stranger who saw me with it smiled and I soon found out why. It can be read by anyone with a modest scientific education (little more than high school) but it takes you up to the frontiers of research on gene regulation. Readers who remember the way "Scientific American" used to cover molecular biology in 1960's through the '80's (or have read reprints from that era) will appreciate the highly visual style and the clear prose. The genetic switch
in question determines whether the genes of a virus that infects a bacterial cell will quietly integrate themselves into the bacterial genome and be copied along with the bacteria's genes each time the cell divides or use the cell's machinery to make many copies of itself, quickly destroying the cell in the process. If you are like me you'll be fascinated to learn how this switch works and about the experiments that revealed its secrets.

Excellent title that sheds some light on how life, or not-life like viruses, works. You can read this book even if you are not a biologist, or if you have almost no scientific background. True, you might need to resort sometimes to Wikipedia in the later case, but you will likely gain something.

"A Genetic Switch" by Mark Ptashne is a modern classic of science writing. This book details the mechanism and presents the supporting data for the paradigm of bacterial gene regulation, the bacteriophage lambda repressor. What sets this book apart is not just the subject matter, but the clarity of Ptashne's writing and the superb illustrations that accompany his text. The combination of the two make the book useful for graduate students but also accessible for the general reader with an interest in science. Whenever new people join my laboratory, I have them read this book. Highly recommended.