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The genetic age is upon us, yet most people
have only a limited understanding of the wondrous chemical
that encodes the formula for all living things. As DNA's
secrets are revealed, they must be rescued from the obscuring
language of science, and now Signs of Life does just
that. Borrowing from the humanities, Robert Pollack offers
an entirely fresh perspective: DNA, he argues, should be
seen as a great work of natural literature, a three-billion-year-old,
continuously evolving text.
As award-winning scientist and teacher,
Pollack displays both a sophisticated understanding of biology
and a remarkable gift for metaphor. In elegant prose, he
shows precisely how DNA provides the instruction book for
life. He takes us deep inside a living cell -- a teeming
walled city -- and explains how the genetic script at its
heart governs all its operations. He opens the book containing
the human genome and lucidly reveals the process by which
biologists and physicians have begun to read its words and
sentences.
But the frontier of genetics now extends
into troubling territory. Pollack identifies several areas
of concern: their ambitious but flawed Human Genome Project,
the wide-spread access to individual genetic data, the temptation
to manipulate genetic codes to make them "better."
Given our still-crude ability to interpret these living
texts, our eagerness to rewrite them is alarming. The power
to change the human genome brings with it enormous responsibilities,
and Pollack offers persuasive evidence that if we fail to
achieve a fuller understanding of the multiple meanings
of DNA, we risk disaster.
Signs of Life is both a brilliant
illumination of a biological text and a provocative meditation
on our awesome new ability to alter it. With the grace of
a born writer and teacher, Robert Pollack has written a
book that will change the way people think about science,
genetics, and the future of our species.
Robert Pollack worked for several years
with James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA's structure,
at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. For many years a professor
of biological sciences at Columbia University, he also served
as dean of Columbia College through much of the 1980s. A
recent winner of a Guggenheim writing fellowship, he now
divides his time between New York City and Vermont.
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