The Geneticist Who Played Hoops with My DNA, by David Ewing Duncan

I’ve been getting more interested in biotech lately — realized that there are lots of things happening in the world that have a high potential to affect my life (and my wife’s & son’s) that I know pretty close to nothing about. I almost didn’t read this book because the title was so lousy — but that would have been a shame, because it was a really interesting read.

The beginning is a basic overview of biotech, then the author launches into a series of profiles of the most important people in biotech to date — he likens each to an archetypal figure:

  • Douglas Melton — Prometheus
  • Cynthia Kenyon — Eve
  • Francis Collins — Paul
  • Craig Venter — Faustus
  • James Watson — Zeus
  • Sydney Brenner — Puck
  • Paul Berg — Moses

Additionally, he talks throughout the book about the ethical questions of particular types of biotech.

Very intersting & provocative book, and used short words for biology that a software nerd like me can understand.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 28th, 2005 at 9:06 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Comments are closed.