Jacob's Ladder: The History of the Human Genome - Softcover

Gee, Henry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 039334780X ISBN 13: 9780393347807

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004

Synopsis

What makes us as humans all alike and yet as individuals so different?

Jacob's Ladder delivers a remarkably lucid explanation of what the sequencing of the human genome really tells us. Decoding the sequence, evolutionary biologist Henry Gee shows, is just the beginning: seeing the letters and words. The next frontier is in understanding snatches of conversation between genes―how they interact to direct the growth of an organism. Gee takes us into the heart of that conversation, illuminating how genes govern a single egg cell's miraculous transformation into a human being, and how they continue to direct that person's day-by-day development throughout a lifetime.

Gee tells the story of what we know about the genome today and what we are likely to discover tomorrow. As our knowledge advances, we will be able to direct with increasing authority the conversations between genes: not only performing medical interventions but also creating whole scripts directing birth, ancestry, and diversity in a brave new world.

About this title

Review:

Although sequencing the human genome has brought speculation about all kinds of results--from curing to cloning--another sort of scientific payoff is in the works. In Jacob's Ladder, former UCLA professor Henry Gee shifts focus from the applied science of genomics to the basic research questions that can be addressed with this new information. "To describe the sequencing of the genome as a technical feat," he writes, "is to miss the point." Gee is most excited about the possibilities of understanding what makes us all human, rather than the individual genetic variances that make us individuals. He examines the genome as a motif representing the "pinnacle of human self-knowledge." Further, he claims that the philosophical shadow of Darwin has made us forget that one of the central questions of our being is how all of us are made from nothing, or rather from everything. To redirect thought, he closely describes how genes control the development of every human, both within and before each individual lifetime. While Gee's ideas are large enough to support a book on this by now well-covered subject, general readers will likely be put off by his somewhat dry and academic style. --Therese Littleton

About the Author:

Henry Gee, former Regents Professor at UCLA, is a science writer for Nature. He lives in London.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 039334780X
• ISBN 13: 9780393347807
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 290