[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on The Origins of Virtue
The book starts at a rapid pace with the discovery of DNA: the story of its isolation by Friedrich Miescher from the pus soaked bandages of wounded German soldiers in 1869, Oswald Avery’s 1943 observation that DNA could transform Pneumococcus from an uncoated to a coated phenotype, and the immortal events of 1953 provide an exciting and even thrilling read. Ridley knows what to include. Who would have guessed that, in a letter to his uncle, Miescher himself had speculated that DNA might convey inheritance “just as the words and concepts of all languages can find expression in 24–30 letters of the alphabet” or that Avery had to undersell his nucleotide message for fear of upsetting the then-dominant protein paradigm?
But the heart of Genome does not lie in history; rather, it lies in the contemporary. Literature from 1999 is referenced, and the range is remarkable from the last universal common ancestor to the roundish flat worm to ribozymes. Also described, each with a dedicated chapter, are such topics as CAG repeats and Huntington disease; intelligence; the conflicting genetic explanations for homosexuality; Hox genes; the genetics of body odour; Tay Sachs disease; integrins and learning, cancer and apoptosis; the genetic link between atherosclerosis and Alzheimer disease; and prions, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and bovine spongiform encephalopathy. And that is only a partial list. The language is accessible, the metaphors are illuminating, and the tale is enlivened with anecdotes from the worlds of clinical medicine, zoology and evolutionary biology. Key researchers are described, and their motives, intriguingly outlined. The description of the science is accurate and informative, yet the implications are discussed in a wide context, as evidenced by a random selection from the index:
Heisenberg W, Hill A, Hiroshima bombing, Hitler A, HIV, Holland B, Holmes O, Homeobox. Some of the chapters provide essays on important themes.....
