I remember reading a long while back that if Newton had not explained gravity, someone else would have. This doesn't take away the credit for his contribution but means that such important things cannot go too long without being addressed by someone. I felt that the book "Genome - The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters" by Matt Ridley falls into that categoty. It is a piece of work that was just sitting there for someone to locate and pull it out. I wish I had written it myself. :-)
The human DNA and genome is often incorrectly described as a blueprint for life. Actually each part of a blue print precisely defines how one part of a building needs to be constructed. Though there may be some general definition, individual parts of a blue print has no systemic relevance and the same blueprint is not repeated in every part of the building over and over either. So, looking at DNA as a book of life makes more sense. Once you do that, writing a book with 23 chapters, with each one describing something relevant to one chromosome nicely follows. The author had done a neat job of putting this elegant idea to work, identifying one characteristic gene/quality representing each one of the chromosomes and writing about all its manifestations in that chapter.
First chapter is aptly titled Life, discussing what is a life form (something that can replicate itself and bring order) and how a filament of DNA contains the recipe for making life forms. He talks about the simplicity of the language of DNA itself with just four alphabets (A, C, G and T) and how the genes in the little finger of our hand are direct descendants of the first replicator molecules from an unbroken chain of billions of copies over millions of years! Next chapter dives into how somehow in their digital language the genes that are almost identical between humans and chimpanzees tell the foot of a human fetus to grow into a flat object with a heel and a big toe, while the same gene in a chimpanzee tells it to grow into a more curved object with less of a heel and longer, more prehensile toes!
Subsequent chapters dive into history, fate, formation of diseases like cancer due to mutations, really neat discussion on how different parts of the human body gets formed just once in the right order/location correctly as the foetus grows, how telomere copying puts a limit on longevity, cures for diseases, and concludes with discussion on eugenics and free will. In the 22nd chapter discussing eugenics, he points out as to how all the countries in the world including US, Sweden, Germany passed and promulgated eugenics laws to prevent certain sections of the population from breeding. Perhaps being a Britisher, he then gets glib glossing over details to claim how "sanity prevailed in Briton" alone where no such laws were passed! He himself has pointed out as to how most of the material for eugenics came from Britannia and quotes people like Churchill who advocated the use of X-rays and operations to sterilize the mentally unfit insisting the "curse would die with them". In the next page he does correctly points out as to how amniocentesis is used in countries like India to about fetuses of girls with no additional equivocation. How would it sound if I glibly announce that sanity prevails in India based on anecdotal evidence that my own sister as well as many of my close friends have only daughters?!
One quality that puzzles me with most books of this kind is the total absence of any illustrations/photos anywhere! Decades back adding figures in books might have added considerable production cost. This book itself is ~15 years old. But even now most of the books we see don't seem to carry any drawings. In my limited technical writing experience, I always find adding illustrations extremely useful in making materials of this kind more accessible. I looked around the web for reasons that will preclude inclusion. But couldn't find anything meaningful.
Though there is no special gene for free will, last chapter does a nice job of bringing the screen down on the whole narration discussing nature vs nurture and how one influences the other. Many of my friends have read this book a long time back. I am catching up finally. If you haven't, do give it a go, after watching YouTube and Khan Academy videos for quick visual primers on the topics of genes, chromosomes and DNA so that you are all set to digest and enjoy the material as you read through.
-sundar.
