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The world -- indeed human beings themselves
-- could be changed for ever in the coming decades and centuries
by the new biotechnologies: cloning, 'genomics' and, above
all, by genetic engineering. 'Designer crops' -- GMOs --
are already with us. The 'designer baby' is now being planned.
We need, as a matter of urgency, to understand the issues
involved and, above all, to find acceptable and robust ways
to control our own ingenuity. But how can we do so when
the ideas seem so complex and various that even the experts
appear confused?
Here, for the first time, Colin Tudge gives
us a comprehensive and wonderfully readable narrative account
of the science of genetics and its applications. The story
and its underlying principles are utterly compelling --
and beguilingly simple to grasp. Above all it makes clear
that all the great insights of the twentieth century which
are now changing our lives spring directly from the work
of one man -- an Augustinian friar named Gregor Mendel.
In the 1850s and '60s, growing peas in his monastery garden
in Brno in Moravia, Mendel worked out the basic laws of
heredity. Once we understand what Mendel did and why --
and why nobody did it sooner -- all subsequent advances
fall naturally into place and a brilliant light is thrown
onto the future of humanity.
Colin Tudge read zoology at Peterhouse,
Cambridge, and became a writer, mainly for New Scientist
and the BBC. However, he is best known as the author
of a dozen books on evolution, genetics and conservation,
including Last Animals at the Zoo, The Engineer
in the Garden, The Day Before Yesterday and The
Variety of Life. He is currently a Fellow of the Linnaean
Society of London, and a Research Fellow at the Centre for
Philosophy at the London School of Economics.
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