Life's Greatest Secret
The Race to Crack the Genetic Code
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- ¥1,000
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- ¥1,000
発行者による作品情報
Life's Greatest Secret is the story of the discovery and cracking of the genetic code. This great scientific breakthrough has had far-reaching consequences for how we understand ourselves and our place in the natural world. The code forms the most striking proof of Darwin's hypothesis that all organisms are related, holds tremendous promise for improving human well-being, and has transformed the way we think about life.
Matthew Cobb interweaves science, biography and anecdote in a book that mixes remarkable insights, theoretical dead-ends and ingenious experiments with the pace of a thriller. He describes cooperation and competition among some of the twentieth century's most outstanding and eccentric minds, moves between biology, physics and chemistry, and shows the part played by computing and cybernetics. The story spans the globe, from Cambridge MA to Cambridge UK, New York to Paris, London to Moscow. It is both thrilling science and a fascinating story about how science is done.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
English biochemist Lane, whose previous book, Life Ascending, won the 2010 Royal Society Prize for Science Books, combines elegant prose and an enthusiasm for big questions as he attempts to peer into a "black hole at the heart of biology." Scientists "have no idea why cells work the way they do," nor "how the parts evolved," though as Lane points out, eukaryotic cells the building blocks of all multicellular life share multiple complex structural and functional features. With impeccable logic and current research data, he makes a case for a common ancestor of all multicellular life one created by a singular endosymbiotic event between a bacterial cell and an archaon cell that became the cell-powering mitochondrion. Lane walks readers through the details of how bacteria alone could have become metabolically diverse but not structurally complex. He then shows how the addition of mitochondria to the equation allowed a shift in energy flow through the cell, and how the migration of DNA introns from mitochondria DNA to the cell nucleus provided a wealth of new genetic material on which evolution could operate. The science is both a puzzle and a dance; Lane retains a sense of wonder as he embraces a bold hypothesis and delights in the hard data that gives it weight. Cobb (Eleven Days in August), a professor of zoology at the University of Manchester (U.K.), simply and comprehensively explains the history and basics of modern genetics. In the first half of his book, Cobb explores the personalities and the experiments that led to the discovery of the genetic code and how it works. He offers insight into the nature of science, how hypotheses are created and tested, and the collaborations and antagonisms that are common among scientists. Cobb follows breakthroughs up through the 1966 Cold Spring Harbor symposium, which "was entirely devoted to the genetic code." In the second part of the book, he covers the story from 1967 to the present, discussing how much more scientists have learned about the intricacies of DNA, RNA, and protein synthesis. Cobb touches on both pure and applied research, the complexities of epigenetics and gene regulation, possibilities arising from knowledge learned through the Human Genome Project, the use of DNA for computing and data storage, and prospects associated with synthetic biology. His optimism is well grounded and he offers appropriate cautions and calls for regulatory controls. Cobb covers well-plowed ground, but he does so in a manner both thoroughly engaging and truly edifying.
