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This book tells the story behind one of the most difficult --
and ultimately rewarding -- scientific endeavors in modern history: a multibillion-dollar
international undertaking that will revolutionize our understanding of the human
body. Exons, Introns, and Talking Genes is a scientist's view of the Human
Genome Project. Wills explains the science as no layperson could, telling the
story of the scientists involved in the project, the biomedical breakthroughs
that led up to it, and how the new information it generates will change the way
we understand and treat disease. Ever since Watson and
Crick discovered the structure of DNA, scientists have been trying to "read"
the human genetic code locked in the millions and millions of bases that make
up DNA. But over the past thirty years, as many new questions have been raised
as answered. Why, for example, do we carry long, repeating stretches of DNA that
play no discernible role in heredity and that are currently referred to simply
as "junk DNA"? Is it really true that much of human DNA is actually
viral DNA -- remnants, that is, of past infections? And why is most of the DNA
that codes for genes quickly removed as useless "exons," leaving only
the tiny but key "introns"? When completed
in the next century, the Human Genome Project will have determined every gene
sequence in the human body, illuminating for scientists some of the outstanding
problems in human biology: the genesis of cancer, how embryos and fetuses develop,
the mechanisms of aging, and the origins of mutations. Christopher
Wills is Professor of Biology and a member of the Center for Molecular Genetics
at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of The Wisdom
of the Genes. |
