DO NOT READ THIS BOOK...unless

Granddaughter Angie contends with the horse from hell

Do not read this book unless you are an obsessed biochemical hotdog, a masochist, or an insomniac. 

The book is Life’ Greatest Secret by Dr. Matthew Cobb, described as a professor of zoology and history of science at the University of Manchester.  I, of course, am indisputably obsessed with this stuff; I read everything that comes along.  I read Dr. Cobb’s book faithfully, from cover to cover, and benefitted thereby.  However, if I had not been so obsessed it would have been painful to plod through at least the opening 2/3 of the book (I will explain why), and I could have managed to do so only if I had a deep-seated self-loathing.

But one thing is certain: for anyone, the first sections of Dr. Cobb’s book  provide an unfailing, fast-acting remedy for insomnia.

I should add that the assessment above does not apply to what must have been Dr. Cobb’s target audience; the several dozen molecular geneticists in the world who also happen to be interested in the history and philosophy of science.  I wonder why he didn’t simply write them a letter.

Okay, so now let’s stop flinging mud at the poor guy and get down to business.

The book is 314 pages long.  The first 218 constitute a methodically detailed chronology of developments in genetics until the end of the 1960s.  At times it seems to be little more than a record of papers presented at various conferences, with some discussion of their significance.  Additionally, there lurks everywhere throughout this section the sense that it is necessary to refute the notion that cybernetics and information theory are vital to understanding what was going on.  Cobb thinks not, and I agree – but, anyway, who in heck cares how many bits of information may or may not be contained in a stretch of DNA?  All we should care about is what the damned stuff codes for, and what that means for human beings.  In this section we learn such vital stuff as how to pronounce the names Gamow and Rosalind.  Well, I didn’t know, so thanks, Matt.

This same material is covered more accessibly by Horace Judson’s book The Eighth Day of Creation.

Then suddenly, on p. 219, the machine drops into 4-wheel drive and new, interesting material appears.  Gene splicing, epigenetics, retroviruses, transposons, the nature of “junk” DNA, CRISPR, lots of topical stuff, much of it explained very well.  Is this the same guy, I ask.  This part – most of it, anyway – is not the least soporific; in fact, it kept me awake past my bedtime.  I should remark that you probably won’t get much out of this section unless you are at least at my level of biochemical sophistication, which Lord knows is saying very little.  But if you don’t know what mRNA, tRNA or codons (similar creatures) are you will have a hard time.

So, sorry to be so hard on you, Matt.  You should have written 314 pages on the last third of the book.

I want to close with a quotation, from p. 312.  It seems to me to capsulize much of what is wrong with the current phase of our War on Cancer:

“The increasingly tight budgets of funding organizations encourage large teams by promoting multidisciplinarity and often require the probable outcomes to be clear before the experiments have begun.  It seems unlikely that the small, curiosity-driven teams that led to the cracking of the genetic code would survive in today’s climate.”