Customer Reviews

A History of Molecular Biology

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If you are interested in subjects like cloning and genetic engineering, then you should read Michel Morange's "The history of molecular biology". The developments just mentioned did not happen overnight. They are the product of decades of work and the book starts with the earliest experiments in molecular biology, the child of biochemistry and genetics. To make the book easier to understand, because some of the concepts are difficult, the book is organized by theme. In each theme progress is discussed in chronological order. Unlike how biology is taught, as a series of smooth steps, there actually was competition between various viewpoints and Morange outlines these. The major weakness of the book was that there was little biographic material on the scientists, although if molecular biology is like other sciences, then some of the characters must have been quirky. The book was written in French and translated by Matthew Cobb, but the translation was uneven and some of the sentence structure did not translate well into English. This was surprising since Cobb has shown himself to be an excellent writer as demonstrated in "The egg and sperm race". Overall the book was very interesting but the novice to molecular biology might have to do some extra research.

Very French oriented ie. Jacob/Monod vs Brenner.
However, defined a problem I have answered on the relationship between population "genes" and molecular biology "genes". He missed my Theory of Genotypic Selection and my deconvolution of all the levels of replication and selectionist versus non-selectionist theories. However, I will use this book in my course. It's a start. I may even force the students to buy it in French as not all molecular biology knowledge is in English. He also missed my demonstrating to Sanger that acrylamide gels can resolve by one nucleotide. This level of resolution was first demonstrated by B.J. Davis in Len Ornstein's lab at Mt. Sinai. BJ has recently passed away.