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What is life? What are genes? Can life exist
without genes? What will living things be in the future
and how did life evolve in the first place? Taking us beyond
biology and genes, through ground-breaking analysis of all
the genetic clues contained in each one of us, Adrian Woolfson
broadens and changes our view of the future forever.
Crystal clear and jargon-free, Life Without
Genes is packed with vivid and surreal examples drawn
from the world around us. Could a pufferfish behave like
a fly? Might giraffes grow taller than skyscrapers? How
are crocodiles able to stay underwater for more than an
hour? Is it possible to turn a stickleback into a daffodil,
or a tiger into a porcupine? Did the very first creatures
lack genes altogether? Woolfson asks us to imagine a hypermarket
stocked with every possible type of toy in the universe,
to see DNA as an infinitely flexible Lego and then he takes
us on swirling Peter Pan-like trips through the past, present
and future of our own genes and shows us the full scope
(and perils) of genetic engineering.
A uniquely accessible work of science, with
shades of Huxley, Lewis Carroll and Darwin, Life Without
Genes presents a truly startling vision of a future
where the consequences of our current genetic experiments
turn out to be both stranger and more foreign than we ever
imagined. It shows us a world dominated by artificially
constructed biological machines, and suggests that the very
genetic codes, DNA and protein building block materials
of contemporary living things, might themselves one day
be supplanted by more alternative designs and technologies.
Our conception of life, evolution -- and genetics -- will
never be the same again.
Adrian Woolfson was educated in London,
Cambridge and Oxford. He is a Wellcome Trust Clinical Research
Fellow in the Division of Protein and Nucleic Acid Chemistry
at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular
Biology in Cambridge and a Charles and Katherine Darwin
Research Fellow in Molecular Biology at Darwin College,
Cambridge.
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