Customer Reviews

The Making of a Fly: The Genetics of Animal Design

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I was fortunate enough to buy this at the bargain price of $19,087,354 there must have been a sale because the next day it was listed at $23M. I was very pleased to find upon arrival that the book contained very useful information, however to be honest I was expecting a few more pictures for the price paid. I highly recommend this to all my associates, I have many acquaintances with children in only the best private schools who will be buying several copies. If the price has you worried, ask yourself the American question: "can you really put a price on good education?"

As a Wall Street investment banker, I typically enjoy only the finest things in life. Nice cars, nice houses, and nice cigars. And speaking of cigars, I only light them with the most expensive currency available. Lately, I have run low on my collection of old $1,000 bills, so I was excited to see a book for $23 million on Amazon. I decided to place an order for the book (super saver shipping, of course), and received my copy of "The Making of a Fly: The Genetics of Animal Design." At nearly 230 pages in length, each sheet of paper in the book is worth $200,000. I cracked the book open and ripped a page out. My troubles began at this stage. After prepping my Gran Habano Corojo, I lit the page. It burned much faster than American currency. I scrambled to get my cigar lit, but the page burned so fast I had no choice but to drop it. And I dropped it on my polar bearskin rug. Unfortunately, The rug caught on fire quickly and I had to scramble out and onto the deck. Oh yes, I should mention that I was on my 140 foot yacht at the time. I called my servants at once to put out the fire, but the gold plated fire extinguishers I kept aboard were unfortunately being replated at the time. We had to board the lifeboat (a 30 foot ski-boat) and leave the yacht. It was painful watching my yacht burn, but the greatest tragedy is that the remainder of the book also burned. I tried to obtain another copy of the book, but alas, it had gone down in price.

What a great book! Lawrence has managed to take the long history and complex details of genetic studies on drosophila development, and synthesize it all into an accessible summary that anyone can understand. This is by far the most concise and straightforward summary of fly development, and should be considered a must-read for anyone who cares about developmental biology. OK, full-time fly people will probably find it mostly too basic, but for the rest of us it's just right. Sidebars on the different techniques provide useful details for those who care without interrupting the flow of the prose. Defiantely recommended. Plus, the cover picture is really cool.

The general reader interested in not only how a single fly egg cell develops into a complex, formed fly, but how genetic and molecular biological experiments are used to determine such mechanisms, will find this book useful. The maternal systems that establish positional information in the egg cell, followed by the development of parasegments, and followed by expression of groups of cells, are described. It is shown that a large amount of genetic information is required to simply organize the embryo, besides building it. Many of the genes discussed have homologues in other higher animals such as vertebrates.

I normally have a strict policy of paying no more than $10 million for a book, but after previewing "The Making of a Fly," I decided to remove 1.3 million other books from my wish list and free up the cash. From the first chapter ("When a Mommy Fly and a Daddy Fly Love Each Other Very Much...") to coverage of a fly's development ("Buzzing Around People's Ears: Nature or Nurture?"), Peter Lawrence details the minutiae of fly life most humans would never know. The complimentary fly swatter was an unexpected treat, although I believe the publishers may have upped the price for this reason.

I read this book when I was doing a project on drosophila menogaster, and this book really helped. There were some things that were hard to understand, but for the most part it was imformative and concise.

I purchased this book as an investment property. I see my $1,234,349 investment has now paid off handsomely as the book value has topped $23 million. I can't decide if I should list this for sale or await further gains in value.

This is a wonderful summary of that which we have learned from genetic knock-out and knock-in technology. There is a systemic evaluation of even the earliest cell divisions and the results are clear: knock-out or knock-in a gene, and the patterns change. Even axial organization of the egg can be influenced by knocking out a gene.

The focus is entirely on making sense of the drosophila with knock-out and knock-in experiments . Fundamental research into initiating metabolic activity, surface chemistry and protein assembly is not addressed.

I was considering this book until I came across others which are today considered much more valuable:

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I just hope they don't already have a copy. That's always so embarrassing.

For the uninitiated such as I, it has been entirely mysterious how a strand of DNA manages to express itself as a finished animal. Indeed, I really do believe evolution works, and that the information that describes an individual animal is passed on through the coding of DNA. But it has been uncomfortable accepting this principle on faith because authorities in the field say so. Here is a book that describes the process and explains how scientists detect and measure the mechanism. To all my fellow skeptics, I highly recommend this book.