Customer Reviews

Won for All: How the Drosophila Genome Was Sequenced

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

 

 

Having read paise and criticism (both deserved and not) for my own books on Amazon, I'm pretty tthick-skinned about the content of the reviews posted on these pages. They are after all just the reader's opinion, and we are all entitled to our own thoughts, however right or wrong they might be. But I must take issue with Charles Middaugh's review of both Michael Ashburner's book (Won for All) and of Michael Ashburner himself. Most importantly, I take serious umbrage at the claim that Michael is arrogant. I've known this man for three decades and I've written a book with him. I also wrote the epilogue for this book. Michael is brilliant, incredibly dedicated to science, and the truest scholar I know. But there is not an arrogant bone in Michael's body. Indeed, in my draft of the epilogue to Michael's book, I actually refered to him as a "hero". He insisted on re-writing that line, claiming that refering to him as a hero was both un-necessary and un-true. (Ironically, I have since been taken to task for letting Michael alter my description of him and his actions by two of my colleagues who reviewed the book for major scientific journals. They aver, and I agree, that Michael is indeed a hero in the classic sense of the word!) Michael is actually quite modest. What Dr. Middaugh reads as "arrogance" is the fact that Michael was one of the three leaders of the team of many people who sequenced the fly genome. He, perhaps more than any of us, realized just how critical this task was, and how much was at stake for the future of the community of fly geneticists. He knew how important it was that the sequence be done right and, just as importantly, he knew that there could be no compromise, as in none at all, in terms of making that sequence fully and freely available to the entire scientific community. The story Michael tells provides a picture of his constant and uncompromising commitments to those goals. It wasn't an easy task and there were times when pretty heroic tasks by Michael and a few others were required. And in the end, those battles, and most especially the battle for full and free access to the sequence by the community, was Won for All (hence the name of the book!). This is the story of that drama - REAL SCIENCE, REAL PEOPLE,and sometimes very real disagreements. It is a picture of how science is really done. There is no arrogance here, just an uncompromising passion to get a very difficult job done right. If you want to know how science is really done, especially big-project science, read this book.

The best part in this book the history of Drosophila genetics. Otherwise the book is an exciting and interesting story of the present day big science including hard competition between different partners. Being a Finn I found the language of the book quite difficult with all the playing on words. I believe the book oppens only for people who are already in the field. As such is not so good as Watson's "Double helix" which even a layman can follow and find exciting.

What is in this book for us?

If you are interested in how science is made before the process is sanitized for classrooms and papers, this book can give you a good insight. If you want a book to learn the basics in Drosophila genomics, just try another.

This is the story - told by a person near the center of the events - of one of the great achievements of modern genetics, the sequencing of the complete genome of one major genetic model, Drosophila melanogaster.

The story told in this book isn't about technology and experiments. It is about the people behind them. Real people; passionate, whimsical, ambitious. We learn that science is forged throughout the clashing of opposing wills, alliances, random events and good will.

I won't recommend it for people not initiated in Drosophila - though Hawley's Epilogue and Bier's Afterword make for a good primer - or at least in genomics. My own knowledge about that field is quite shallow and I got lost sometimes.

Ashburner wrote it in just a weekend, using a quite colloquial tone and probably didn't think at first in publishing it. That's the reason it will be more enjoyed by people who already knows who is who in the field and followed that genoma race when it happened.
Nevertheless the numerous footnotes help to clarify the obscure details.

This was a very disappointing book for me. Michael Ashburner is a very highly regarded Drosophilia geneticist who has made important scientific contributions in a number of areas and clearly played an important role in the sequencing of the Drosophilia genome. In this book, however, he comes off as almost insufferably arrogant. So much so, in fact, it is hard to believe that he is really the way he comes across in the book. I thought hard about the major problem of this narrative (not hard enough?) and it seems to me to be that it is simply too "cute" for its own good. If you are interested in Dr. Ashburners opinion of hotels and restaurants and the cute nicknames he has for his colleagues or accompanying vignettes (often in the form of footnotes), this might be the book for you. If not, I doubt you will find it of much interest. It lacks any introspective character and is somewhat disturbing (at least to me) regarding the attitudes of many of the people described toward science generally. It is almost as if the author has tried to out "Double Helix" Watson but missed the appropriate tone. Or perhaps he is making fun of Watson's book or the tendency of scientists to take themselves too seriously?-Whatever the case, it may be too subtle for me. It may not be a coincidence that the book is published by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. The author claims to have written the bulk of the text over a few weekends and that is exactly how it reads. If you are a member of the Drosophila research community (I am not), you might find it somewhat amusing. If not, I suspect you may be slightly horrified(I was).
It might be helpful to the uninitiated to read the epilogue written by Scott Hawley first since it provides a nice, useful background summary of the field that makes the body of the account more meaningful.