The Book of Life

In the space of a single human lifetime, one species learned to read the instructions of its own making. The Human Genome Project — the thirteen-year, six-nation effort to sequence the three billion letters of human DNA — was one of the hinge events of modern history, and this is its complete, human story.

Written for the curious general reader, with no background assumed, E.B Cohen explains from first principles what a gene is, how you read a genome, and why anyone wanted to. Here is the whole arc: Mendel counting peas in a monastery garden; Franklin's photograph and Watson and Crick's helix; Sanger's trick for reading DNA; the political birth of the project and its pioneering commitment to ethics; the ferocious race between the public consortium and Craig Venter's Celera; the truce brokered at the White House; the surprises hidden in the sequence — only twenty thousand genes, a genome mostly "junk," and the proof that all humans are more than 99.9 percent identical; the profound questions of privacy, discrimination, and gene patents; and the astonishing harvest of the two decades since, from thousand-dollar genomes and cancer genomics to CRISPR gene editing and the first truly complete human sequence in 2022.

Clear, gripping, and humane, this is the accessible single volume on the greatest scientific collaboration of our age — and on what it means to be the first generation of a species that can read its own genome.