Product Description

John Sulston was director of the Sanger Centre in Cambridge from 1993 to 2000. There he led the British arm of the international team selected to map the entire human DNA sequence, a feat that was pulled off in record time by an extraordinary collaboration of scientists. Despite innumerable setbacks and challenges from outside competitors the ultimate success of the project can be attributed in large part to John Sulston's own determination, passion and scientific excellence. In this personal account he takes us behind the scenes of one of the largest international scientific operations ever undertaken. He is frank about the competition with Craig Venter and Celera Genomics, which threatened to undermine the international community's attempts to make the sequence freely available to everyone. He shares with us his excitement as the project unfolded. And as a pragmatist he reveals his hopes and concerns as to how the information unlocked by the Human Genome Project will affect people's lives in the future. The Common Thread is at once a compelling history of this most exciting of scientific breakthroughs and also an impassioned call for ethical responsibility in scientific research. As the boundaries between science and big business increasingly blur, and researchers race to patent medical discoveries, the international community needs to find a common protocol for the protection of the wider human interest. The Common Thread tells a story of our shared human heritage, offering hope for future research and a fresh outlook on our scientific understanding of ourselves.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #993783 in Books
• Published on: 2010-02-28
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Guardian - Steven Rose
‘Unputdownable…an insider’s story of one of the century’s greatest technopolitical ventures’

Observer - Robin McKie
‘Our nation is much the richer for Sulston’s existence’

The Times - Mark Henderson
‘A compelling and frank account’

Customer Reviews

One of the great stories of our own era
This book really has everything. It's hard to think of a more laudable and fundamental project in terms of understanding the nature of life itself than to sequence our own genetic code.

Although the story of how the sequence was untangled would in itself be a remarkable and noteworthy topic for a book, the fact that it became a battle between private business and publicly funded scientists to unlock the genetic code makes it even more fascinating.

The book becomes a chronology of the race to find the sequence between a public group of scientists determined to keep the knowledge public for the sake of science and future research, and the "bad guys" - a private company trying to do the same thing for their own financial gain.

The book tackles many contemporary issues of science, morality and politics along the way from the start of the project to the publication of most of the genetic sequence near the beginning of the 21st century.

Fascinating stuff with a happy ending too, and one of the great contemporary stories and achievements of science written by someone who was involved from start to finish in the race to publish the human genetic sequence in the public domain.