A Life Decoded
My Genome: My Life
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
Craig Venter is no ordinary scientist, and no ordinary man. He is the first human being ever to read their own DNA – and see the key to life itself. Yet in doing so, he rocked the establishment and became embroiled in one of the biggest controversies of our age.
This is the story of his incredible life: from teenage rebel and Vietnam medic, to daredevil sailor and maverick researcher, whose race to unravel the sequence of the human genome made him both hero and pariah. Incorporating his own genetic make-up into his story, this is an electrifying portrait of a man who pushed back the boundaries of the possible.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A great deal has been written about Venter as the head of Celera, the private research company that won a race with the National Institutes of Health's Human Genome Project to sequence the human genome. His role in this historic accomplishment has been both vilified and praised. Now, in a clumsily written autobiography, Venter offers his side of the story, portraying himself as the eternal underdog, fighting for truth and attempting to make scientific discoveries solely to help others. He is opposed in this struggle by a cadre of scientists out to advance their own careers, by a federal bureaucracy incapable of rationally using public funds to promote scientific advances and by the heads of corporations willing to do almost anything to make money. Venter accuses all of the big players the Human Genome Project's Frances Collins and Nobel laureate James Watson, among many others of outright dishonesty. Ignore the hyperbole and be skeptical of the accusations, but there's still a terribly depressing story about the politics of big science. Venter also attempts to contextualize the controversy swirling around the patenting of DNA sequences. Despite the lack of unbiased insight, this is well worth reading for the fascinating perspective it offers on one of the major scientific discoveries of all time.
