Despite an often heavy burden of technical details, the personalities and machinations involved in Big Science make this an...
The accomplished Venter, whose race to be the first to sequence the human genome made him a controversial figure, offers an engaging, albeit self-serving, story of his life and scientific achievements.
In keeping with the book’s subtitle, and challenging the notion that genes are destiny, sidebars throughout the book explore the possible implications of portions of Venter’s own genome. Most accessible are his accounts of growing up in California, where a bent for risk-taking and building things foreshadowed his later career, and of his time as a Navy medic in Vietnam, where a new-found interest in medicine sent the former near-dropout on to college and an eventual Ph.D. in biochemistry. It was also in Vietnam that Venter began his love affair with sailing, a passion he would carry throughout his life. The book becomes denser as Venter writes about his scientific work, first as a graduate student, then on the faculty at the State University of New York at Buffalo and later at the National Institutes of Health. It was at the NIH that he developed a new strategy for sequencing genes and encountered the intense politics, lobbying and maneuvering that plagued the genome effort. Neither James Watson nor his successor as head of the government’s Human Genome Project, Francis Collins, receive flattering portraits, and neither do certain business figures with whom Venter formed alliances when the NIH refused to fund his ideas for gene sequencing. In 1992, with commercial backing, he formed The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), which successfully sequenced the first genome of a living organism. In 1998, upon becoming president of Celera Genomics, he announced that his group would sequence the entire humane genome faster and cheaper than the government-run project by using automated DNA sequencing machines and new mathematical algorithms. In 2001, the results were published in Science, but in 2002 tensions between Venter and his financial backer forced him out as Celera’s president. Today he heads the J. Craig Venter Institute, a genomic-focused not-for-profit research center that is trolling the ocean to capture the DNA of its microbial life and experimenting with biological techniques for producing hydrogen and reducing carbon dioxide.
Despite an often heavy burden of technical details, the personalities and machinations involved in Big Science make this an engaging read.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-670-06358-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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