Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code Kindle Edition

LGS is a fine retelling of events related to how the correspondence between DNA sequence and amino acid sequence in proteins was established - i.e., the genetic code. Previous histories of the era include "The Eighth Day of Creation", "Who Wrote the Book of Life?" and "A History of Molecular Biology" (translated from the French by Cobb). He has told the story chronologically versus the somewhat meandering "Eighth". LGS has sufficient references to guide the reader to source materials.

The level of presentation is fine for a general audience and has benefited from access to lab notebooks and the like that allow for a more lively presentation, e.g., "At 3.00 a.m. on Saturday 27 May 1961, Heinrich Matthaei began one of the most significant experiments in the history of biology." And that is not a hyperbolic statement! Cobb makes an effort to show how the ideas of information and cybernetics informed the changing mindset that is now called molecular biology.

The latter part of the book serves as an overview of what has happened since the late 60's. A story still being lived and full of ever more awe-inspiring discoveries: sequencers and genome-wide studies, epigenetic processes, and societal implications.

There's much more to the story of molecular biology since 1953 that is not exposed and is at least as interesting, such as how ATP Synthase works and why it is that we think that we know this. Similarly for ribosomal processes, splicing mechanisms and the bacterial immune system known as CRISPR.

LGS is a great place to start.

When people think about the scientific accomplishments of the 20th century the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule is always remembered as one of the most important. Despite the monumental importance of the structure of DNA there are a host of other scientific discoveries that were of incredible importance related to our biochemistry. In addition the evolution of our understanding of ourselves is lost in trumpeting the moments of accomplishment rather than the path that led to such discoveries and the given knowledge of the day. Life's Greatest Secret gives an account of the history of our understanding of our genetic structure and the way information is encoded at the cellular level. It provides the reader with a continuous history of how our understanding of ourselves at the cellular level evolved.

The author starts with Schrodinger's thoughts on the subject of What is Life. A century ago little was known about how genetic information is encoded. We had Mendel's results and evolutionary ideas were entrenched but the mechanism in which information was passed generation to generation was absent. The search for such a mechanism was challenged due to the magnitude of the problem and the lack of precision instruments to be able to help us understand what was occurring. Schrodinger hypothesized that the complexity of ourselves could be embedded in an aperiodic crystal. Around this time as well the subject of information theory was being developed by Claude Shannon for transmission of information in noisy channels and this subject was also being used to analyze the information structure of various candidates for transferring heredity. The author discusses how people thought about the prospects of nucleic acids for containing the recipe of life, which was low, given the simplicity of the base pair combinations as well as proteins, which was high due to their complexity. The author gives a history of the experiments used to show that viruses used DNA to transfer itself and gives the precise experimental evidence that was gained to hone in on the relevance of DNA in transferring heredity. The author also discusses the progress on how genetic code is often about gene regulation and in particular that proteins are coded for inhibiting reactions as well as catalyzing them and how this was a critical break through in understanding things like the spread of cancer. The author also discusses of course Watson and Crick and the discovery of the form of DNA; he also discusses the scientific community that surrounded them and were competing with them at the time of discovery. The author also spends a lot of time on the experiments done which show how amino acid sequences code for proteins which were catalyzed repetitive synthesized DNA sequences. The book covers many more topics including modern understanding of "junk DNA" as well as redundancy in our code.

Life's Greatest Secret gives the reader an overview of biochemistry and genetics over the 20th century. It gives a much more full picture of the history and evolution of our understanding of the genetic code and how information is encoded in genes than I have read elsewhere. The author is clear to highlight that the process is not a mathematical and optimized one as our history is a sequence of chance occurrences not by design so our information theoretic predictions about the structure of information in the code are essentially worthless. Definitely worth reading for those interested in the history of science.

L

Matthew Cobb put together an outstanding chronicle of the efforts to understand how life works. The writing is clear and compelling and the deep research shines through as the developments are brought to us, not only as facts, but also the underlying thinking and social constructs that helped shape this race.

The reader receives a good understanding of DNA, RNA, amino acids, proteins, ribosomes and the mechanisms of their interaction.

Many individuals are brought to us in a straight forward manner, without judgments by today's standards. This includes (in)famous and accomplished individuals, whom you would not expect, who contributed in one way or another.

This book is informative and entertaining. It continues beyond the 'race' up to current developments and refinements.

The key words are sequence, code, information, codons and dogma, but you must read this book to find out what these terms mean.