9780618040278

Your Satisfaction is Guaranteed:

• 30 Day Return Policy
• Bookseller Guarantee
• Privacy & Security Policy

We humans have been tinkering with genes for a long, long time. In Shrinking the Cat, Sue Hubbell shows how this tinkering is the definition of humanness by telling the stories of four important species we created. She tells how we made cats easier to live with by making them smaller and their brains less complicated, taking out much of the alertness that natural selection had packed in. How ancient farmers turned a wild grass into corn, a tremendously important crop that can't live without us. How silkworms were smuggled from China to the West and bred to be completely dependent on us. How silk traders picked up wild apples in their travels and how we manipulated the apple's complex genetics to grow only the best-tasting ones - and then made them taste worse. Today's tools are new, but we were engineering genes even before we knew about them, and we made some mistakes along the way. For example, the gypsy moths that regularly defoliate trees arrived through efforts to breed silkworms suitable to North America.
Genetic engineering is controversial today. Some see it as a source of great benefit and great profits; others see it as a nightmare. Sue Hubbell shows that if we ignore our own history, pretending that genetic engineering is something completely new and dangerous, we are condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past.

"Hubbell casts her information such entertaining and choicely phrased terms that it's difficult to say where fun leaves off and learning begins. In her new book, SHRINKING THE CAT, she's in stellar form."

Michael Upchurch, Chicago Tribune, 12/02/01

"There's a grin lurking somewhere in the back of [Hubbell's] reasonable prose, with is peculiar mixture of formality and comfort (and its accessibility to those of us who worry we'd be lost in any discussion of science….SHRINKING THE CAT is a vision of nature as a Waring blender presided over by a cosmic mixmaster who occasionally lets us mortals seize the controls. If we proceed with caution there may be a really neat smoothie at the end of it, instead of toxic muck."

Charles Taylor, Salon, 12/11/01

Shrinking the Cat: Genetic Engineering Before We Knew About Genes: Search Results