Life's Greatest Secret

May 11, 2015
Cobb (Eleven Days in August), a professor of zoology at the University of Manchester (U.K.), simply and comprehensively explains the history and basics of modern genetics. In the first half of his book, Cobb explores the personalities and the experiments that led to the discovery of the genetic code and how it works. He offers insight into the nature of science, how hypotheses are created and tested, and the collaborations and antagonisms that are common among scientists. Cobb follows breakthroughs up through the 1966 Cold Spring Harbor symposium, which "was entirely devoted to the genetic code." In the second part of the book, he covers the story from 1967 to the present, discussing how much more scientists have learned about the intricacies of DNA, RNA, and protein synthesis. Cobb touches on both pure and applied research, the complexities of epigenetics and gene regulation, possibilities arising from knowledge learned through the Human Genome Project, the use of DNA for computing and data storage, and prospects associated with synthetic biology. His optimism is well grounded and he offers appropriate cautions and calls for regulatory controls. Cobb covers well-plowed ground, but he does so in a manner both thoroughly engaging and truly edifying. Agent: George Lucas, Inkwell Management.

Starred review from May 1, 2015
Animal breeders have always known that "like breeds like," but no one, Charles Darwin included, knew why offspring resemble parents except, sometimes, when they don't. Cobb (Zoology/Univ. of Manchester; Eleven Days in August: The Liberation of Paris 1944, 2014, etc.) describes how they learned. One of the only defects of his fine history of genetics is the title. There was rarely a race to figure out the genetic code but rather a stream of advances that began with the 17th-century speculation of the great physician William Harvey, sped up after the 1900 rediscovery of Mendel's laws, and accelerated still more in 1943, when Oswald Avery and Maclyn McCarty showed that DNA contained the genetic code. (This was perhaps the greatest discovery that didn't win a Nobel Prize.) The DNA molecule is so simple that many scientists found this hard to accept, but by 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick revealed its structure, they knew where to look. Details of how this deceptively uniform molecule guides production of a living organism began pouring out with the arrival of computers and the information revolution during the following decades. Genetics is, after all, information. Unraveling the code and putting it to work, writes Cobb, "was a leap forward in humanity's understanding of the natural world and our place within in, akin to the discoveries of Galileo and Einstein in the realm of physics or the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. These comparisons are not the fruit of hindsight, they were made at the time." The greatest milestone in 20th-century biology received an iconic account in Horace Freeland Judson's The Eighth Day of Creation (1979). Much has happened since that publication, and Cobb's gripping, insightful history, often from the mouths of the participants themselves, updates the story, bringing it all the way into the present.

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May 15, 2015

Cobb (zoology, Univ. of Manchester; The Resistance) relates the convoluted history of research on DNA, the molecule that carries our genetic data, and its metabolic partner RNA. He explains how the nascent field of cybernetics furnished a metaphor for the encoding and transmission of heritable information. Inspired by this metaphor, an assortment of researchers--some collaborative and others bitterly competitive--determined the structure of DNA and the general mechanism of protein synthesis, proposed a model for operons (genes regulated in a coordinated fashion), and finished deciphering the genetic code by the mid-1960s. The last quarter of the book is an overview of recent research on nucleic acids. Few illustrations appear in the review copy; one hopes more will be added to the published book to explain some of the complex molecular mechanisms described. (Similarly, the index was not seen.) VERDICT Like Cobb's other titles, this scholarly work reflects extensive research and draws upon primary documents. Upper-level students and researchers in biology or the history of science are best equipped to appreciate this detailed book. Other readers should consider Michel Morange's A History of Molecular Biology.--Nancy R. Curtis, Univ. of Maine Lib., Orono

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