DNA: The Secret of Life - Hardcover

Watson, James D.; Berry, Andrew

 
9780375415463: DNA: The Secret of Life
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375415467 ISBN 13: 9780375415463
Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

A history of the genetic revolution, published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of DNA's molecular structure breakthrough, presents coverage of the double helix, the mapping of the human genome, molecular dynamics, and the potential of genetics technology. 150,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

James D. Watson was director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York from 1968 to 1993 and is now its president. He was the first director of the National Center for Human Genome Research of the National Institutes of Health from 1989 to 1992. A member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society, he has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Science, and, with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1962.

Andrew Berry, with a Ph.D. in fruit fly genetics, is a research associate of Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. A writer and teacher, he is the editor of a collection of the writings of the Victorian biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, Infinite Tropics (Verso, 2002).

Andrew Berry is a research associate of Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology.

Aus dem Klappentext

Fifty years ago, James D. Watson, then just twentyfour, helped launch the greatest ongoing scientific quest of our time. Now, with unique authority and sweeping vision, he gives us the first full account of the genetic revolution from Mendel s garden to the double helix to the sequencing of the human genome and beyond.
Watson s lively, panoramic narrative begins with the fanciful speculations of the ancients as to why like begets like before skipping ahead to 1866, when an Austrian monk named Gregor Mendel first deduced the basic laws of inheritance. But genetics as we recognize it today with its capacity, both thrilling and sobering, to manipulate the very essence of living things came into being only with the rise of molecular investigations culminating in the breakthrough discovery of the structure of DNA, for which Watson shared a Nobel prize in 1962. In the DNA molecule s graceful curves was the key to a whole new science.

Having shown that the secret of life is chemical, modern genetics has set mankind off on a journey unimaginable just a few decades ago. Watson provides the general reader with clear explanations of molecular processes and emerging technologies. He shows us how DNA continues to alter our understanding of human origins, and of our identities as groups and as individuals. And with the insight of one who has remained close to every advance in research since the double helix, he reveals how genetics has unleashed a wealth of possibilities to alter the human condition from genetically modified foods to genetically modified babies and transformed itself from a domain of pure research into one of big business as well. It is a sometimes topsy-turvy world full of great minds and great egos, driven by ambitions to improve the human condition as well as to improve investment portfolios, a world vividly captured in these pages.

Facing a future of choices and social and ethical implications of which we dare not remain uninformed, we could have no better guide than James Watson, who leads us with the same bravura storytelling that made The Double Helix one of the most successful books on science ever published. Infused with a scientist s awe at nature s marvels and a humanist s profound sympathies, DNA is destined to become the classic telling of the defining scientific saga of our age.

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Chapter One
. . .

Beginnings of Genetics: From Mendel to Hitler

My mother, Bonnie Jean, believed in genes. She was proud of her father's Scottish origins, and saw in him the traditional Scottish virtues of honesty, hard work, and thriftiness. She, too, possessed these qualities and felt that they must have been passed down to her from him. His tragic early death meant that her only nongenetic legacy was a set of tiny little girl's kilts he had ordered for her from Glasgow. Perhaps therefore it is not surprising that she valued her father's biological legacy over his material one.

Growing up, I had endless arguments with Mother about the relative roles played by nature and nurture in shaping us. By choosing nurture over nature, I was effectively subscribing to the belief that I could make myself into whatever I wanted to be. I did not want to accept that my genes mattered that much, preferring to attribute my Watson grandmother's extreme fatness to her having overeaten. If her shape was the product of her genes, then I too might have a hefty future. However, even as a teenager, I would not have disputed the evident basics of inheritance, that like begets like. My arguments with my mother concerned complex characteristics like aspects of personality, not the simple attributes that, even as an obstinate adolescent, I could see were passed down over the generations, resulting in "family likeness." My nose is my mother's and now belongs to my three sons.

Sometimes characteristics come and go within a few generations, but sometimes they persist over many. One of the most famous examples of a long-lived trait is known as the "Hapsburg Lip." This distinctive elongation of the jaw and droopiness to the lower lip-which made the Hapsburg rulers of Europe such a nightmare assignment for generations of court portrait painters-was passed down intact over at least twenty-three generations.

The Hapsburgs added to their genetic woes by intermarrying. Arranging marriages between different branches of the Hapsburg clan and often among close relatives may have made political sense as a way of building alliances and ensuring dynastic succession, but it was anything but astute in genetic terms. Inbreeding of this kind can result in genetic disease, as the Hapsburgs found out to their cost. Charles II, the last of the Hapsburg monarchs in Spain, not only boasted a prize-worthy example of the family lip-he could not even chew his own food-but was also a complete invalid, and incapable, despite two marriages, of producing children.

Genetic disease has long stalked humanity. In some cases, such as Charles II's, it has had a direct impact on history. Retrospective diagnosis has suggested that George III, the English king whose principal claim to fame is to have lost the American colonies in the Revolutionary War, suffered from an inherited disease, porphyria, which causes periodic bouts of madness. Some historians-mainly British ones-have argued that it was the distraction caused by George's illness that permitted the Americans' against-the-odds military success. While most hereditary diseases have no such geopolitical impact, they nevertheless have brutal and often tragic consequences for the afflicted families, sometimes for many generations. Understanding genetics is not just about understanding why we look like our parents. It is also about coming to grips with some of humankind's oldest enemies: the flaws in our genes that cause genetic disease.

our ancestors must have wondered about the workings of heredity as soon as evolution endowed them with brains capable of formulating the right kind of question. And the readily observable principle that close relatives tend to be similar can carry you a long way if, like our ancestors, your concern with the application of genetics is limited to practical matters like improving domesticated animals (for, say, milk yield in cattle) and plants (for, say, the size of fruit). Generations of careful selection-breeding initially to domesticate appropriate species, and then breeding only from the most productive cows and from the trees with the largest fruit-resulted in animals and plants tailor-made for human purposes. Underlying this enormous unrecorded effort is that simple rule of thumb: that the most productive cows will produce highly productive offspring and from the seeds of trees with large fruit large-fruited trees will grow. Thus, despite the extraordinary advances of the past hundred years or so, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by no means have a monopoly on genetic insight. Although it wasn't until 1909 that the British biologist William Bateson gave the science of inheritance a name, genetics, and although the DNA revolution has opened up new and extraordinary vistas of potential progress, in fact the single greatest application of genetics to human well-being was carried out eons ago by anonymous ancient farmers. Almost everything we eat-cereals, fruit, meat, dairy products-is the legacy of that earliest and most far-reaching application of genetic manipulations to human problems.

An understanding of the actual mechanics of genetics proved a tougher nut to crack. Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) published his famous paper on the subject in 1866 (and it was ignored by the scientific community for another thirty-four years). Why did it take so long? After all, heredity is a major aspect of the natural world, and, more important, it is readily, and universally, observable: a dog owner sees how a cross between a brown and black dog turns out, and all parents consciously or subconsciously track the appearance of their own characteristics in their children. One simple reason is that genetic mechanisms turn out to be complicated. Mendel's solution to the problem is not intuitively obvious: children are not, after all, simply a blend of their parents' characteristics. Perhaps most important was the failure by early biologists to distinguish between two fundamentally different processes, heredity and development. Today we understand that a fertilized egg contains the genetic information, contributed by both parents, that determines whether someone will be afflicted with, say, porphyria. That is heredity. The subsequent process, the development of a new individual from that humble starting point of a single cell, the fertilized egg, involves implementing that information. Broken down in terms of academic disciplines, genetics focuses on the information and developmental biology focuses on the use of that information. Lumping heredity and development together into a single phenomenon, early scientists never asked the questions that might have steered them toward the secret of heredity. Nevertheless, the effort had been under way in some form since the dawn of Western history.

The Greeks, including Hippocrates, pondered heredity. They devised a theory of "pangenesis," which claimed that sex involved the transfer of miniaturized body parts: "Hairs, nails, veins, arteries, tendons and their bones, albeit invisible as their particles are so small. While growing, they gradually separate from each other." This idea enjoyed a brief renaissance when Charles Darwin, desperate to support his theory of evolution by natural selection with a viable hypothesis of inheritance, put forward a modified version of pangenesis in the second half of the nineteenth century. In Darwin's scheme, each organ-eyes, kidneys, bones-contributed circulating "gemmules" that accumulated in the sex organs, and were ultimately exchanged in the course of sexual reproduction. Because these gemmules were produced throughout an organism's lifetime, Darwin argued any change that occurred in the individual after birth, like the stretch of a giraffe's neck imparted by craning for the highest foliage, could be passed on to the next generation. Ironically,...

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Verlag
Alfred a Knopf Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2003
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375415467
ISBN 13 
9780375415463
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
464
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Knopf
https://knopfdoubleday.com

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