My Genome - My Life
Author : J. Craig Venter
Pages : 400
Publisher: Viking Adult
Price : $25.95.
ISBN :10-0143114182
April of 2013 marks the 10th anniversary of completing and publishing the Human Genome Project. And, here is a scientist who raced for it while the US government's National Institute of Health was still stumbling over it: Craig Venter. A Life Decoded is the autobiography of him who has become one of the most fascinating and controversial figures in science today.It is one of the key scientific chronicles of our lifetime, as told by the man who beat the odds to make it happen.
In his riveting and inspiring account Venter tells of the unparalleled drama of the quest for the human genome, a tale that involves as much politics (personal and political) as science. He also reveals how he went on to be the first to read and interpret his own genome and what it will mean for all of us to do the same. He describes his recent sailing expedition to sequence microbial life in the ocean, as well as his groundbreaking attempt to create synthetic life.
Growing up in California, Craig Venter didn t appear to have much of a future. An unremarkable student, he nearly flunked out of high school. After being drafted into the army, he enlisted in the navy and went to Vietnam, where the life and death struggles he encountered as a medic piqued his interest in science and medicine. After pursuing his advanced degrees, Venter quickly established himself as a brilliant and outspoken scientist.
In 1984 he joined the National Institutes of Health, where he introduced novel techniques for rapid gene discovery, and left in 1991 to form his own nonprofit genomics research center, where he sequenced the first genome in history in 1995. In 1998 he announced that he would successfully sequence the human genome years earlier, and for far less money, than the government-sponsored Human Genome Project would a prediction he kept in 2001.
The scientific heart of Venter’s story begins after he adopted new technologies to hunt for adrenaline-related genes in the late 1980s, then leapt into genomics. (A genome is an organism’s entire string of DNA, present in most human cells.) Independently, if not uniquely, as he notes, Venter developed a clever shortcut for identifying genes out of long stretches of DNA.Venter recounts this while lambasting National Institute of Health leaders,especially James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA for not fully backing his work.
But he never found a comfortable place in the fledgling government project to chart the human genome and in 1992 joined a new private group, the Institute for Genomic Research. There, Venter and colleagues became the first researchers to chart the whole genome of any organism (a bacterium, Haemophilus influenzae, once thought to cause flu), among other landmarks, and refined a technique allowing scientists to piece together genomes from small bits of DNA, minimizing the ponderous genetic surveying then in use.
In 1998, Venter helped form Celera to sequence a human genome (largely based on his own DNA) before the government could.The hype over the genome race thus both overrates and underrates Venter’s career. The contest itself did not exactly revolutionize genomics, but Venter’s aggressive insistence upon faster sequencing methods throughout his career would have been influential even if no such race had occurred.
Chapters:
1. Writing My Code
2. University of Death
3. Adrenaline Junkie
4. Starting Over in Buffalo
5. Scientific Heaven, Bureaucratic Hell
6. Big Biology
7. TIGR Cub
8. Gene Wars
9. Shotgun Sequencing
10. Institutional Divorce
11. Sequencing the Human
12. Mad Magazine and Destructive Businessmen
13. Flying Forward
14. The First Human Genome
15. The White House, June 26, 2000
16. Publish and Be Damned
17. Blue Planet and New Life
Review Courtesy: http://www.nytimes.com
Link to download: http://www.acad.bg
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