In The Beginning Was The Worm: Finding the Secrets of Life in a Tiny Hermaphrodite

Andrew Brown

ISBN 10: 0743207165 / ISBN 13: 9780743207164

Published by Simon & Schuster UK, London, UK, 2003

About this Item

Book and dust jacket are both spotless and completely free of wear or damage. They will be bubble-wrapped and carefully packed in a sturdy box to ensure safe transit. "Brown writes like an angel." -- The Independent.

Seller Inventory # ABH5827

Bibliographic Details

• Title: In The Beginning Was The Worm: Finding the Secrets of Life in a Tiny Hermaphrodite
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK, London, UK
• Publication Date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0743207165
• ISBN 13: 9780743207164
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine

About this title

Synopsis

This book is an account of the first great triumph of the thirty-year struggle to decode the complete DNA of a nematode worm. Success in this was what made the human genome project possible. IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORM is an exciting but scrupulous account of a genuine scientific triumph, which will delight both those who know the subject and those who don't. IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORM tells of some remarkable characters who have changed our approach to science irrevocably, among them Sydney Brenner, a heroic dreamer who first thought of understanding an animal as a sort of biological Meccano; John Sulston, his first post-doctoral student, who managed to raise GBP30 million; his friend, Bob Horvitz, who has, to all intents and purposes, spent more than thirty years studying the 22 cells of a worm's vulva; and Fred Sanger, the only man to have won two Nobel Prizes in the same discipline. Decades of painstaking research triumphed in 1998, when this worm was the first creature to have all its DNA mapped -- but now what? We still don't know how to build a single worm. In this intriguing story of dreams and disillusionment, Andrew Brown contemplates the next fifty years of biological science, and the way that ignorance expands to surround all available knowledge.