Product Description

As the director of the Sanger Centre in Cambridge, the British arm of the international effort to map the entire human DNA sequence, John Sulston was at the very forefront of this cutting-edge research. The ultimate success of the project, despite innumerable setbacks and rogue challenges from outside competitors, is in large part thanks his determination, diplomacy and scientific know-how. The resulting wealth of information promises to be the biggest scientific and medical breakthrough in modern history. In this intimate personal account John Sulston takes us behind the scenes of the largest international scientific operation ever undertaken. He reveals the politics, controversy, ethics, personalities, setbacks and accomplishments that shaped the seven years of research. He is frank about the competition with Craig Venter and Celera Genomics that threatened to undermine the attempts by the international community to make the sequence available for all humanity. He shares with us his obvious passion for science. He takes us into closed-door meetings with Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. And as a pragmatist he shares his hopes and concerns as to how the information unlocked by the Human Genome Project will affect people's lives in the near future, how this information (and future gene sequencing) should be protected, and conjectures about how this astonishing breakthrough will lead medicine, science and our understanding of our selves.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #715253 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Review
'John Sulston is more than anyone else the man who made the Human Genome Project happen.' Matt Ridley

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.