Customer Reviews

The Science Times Book of Genetics

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This is a compendium of various stories run in the Science Times section of the NY Times newspaper from 1992 through 1997, addressing various issues related to genetics -- understanding how the human genome is being sequenced, cloning, ageing and gradual understanding of the process of cancer.

The features are written for an educated, but non-expert audience, with half a dozen diagrams to complement the content. My favorite article was on the research done on Caenorhabditis elegans, a small (1 mm long) soil nematode found in temperate regions. Although C.elegans has no economic impact on humans, its importance, which the article explains, is both in the primitiveness of the organism and the commonality it has with many human biological functions. The book explains this fascinating stuff very well to the layman.

As the editor notes, genetics is still in its "gestational stage," and the book is obviously limited in its snapshot into research. Indeed, only a few years later the first pass of sequencing the human genome was completed earlier than planned.

Two minor complaints about the book are the similarity in some of the stories and the lack of pointers to additional resources...