Hacking the Code of Life - Nessa Carey *****

Nessa Carey has proved consistently effective in putting across the next generation (as it were) aspects of genetics that take as far beyond the selfish gene. We've had The Epigenetics Revolution and Junk DNA on the aspects of genetics where genes are switched on and off, and looking at the parts of DNA that don't code for genes. Now, with Hacking the Code of Life, we come from the natural side to human intervention - the ability to edit the genome and the implications of this ability.

In the past we've seen rather hysterical responses to gene editing, whether it's campaigns against genetically modified organisms that have prevented life-saving developments and wider availability of food, or dramatic predictions of disaster. Carey gives us a more balanced picture. She doesn't play down the risks - but all technology comes with risk. Use of fire might have been one of the greatest steps forward in human development, but it can also kill people. We had to learn to control it and regulate it, and the same goes for gene editing.

In this slim volume, Carey takes us through the mechanics of making modifications to the genome, from the early crude mechanisms to the remarkable precision of CRISPR - which is where things really begin to take off for the future.

The book covers medical applications, the potential transformation of agriculture (surely it's time for the EU to get its act together on GM, which is very different now with these new technologies? - and let's face we've been genetically modifying crops since the beginning of agriculture), animal applications and whether or not we should actively modify ourself, not just to deal with illnesses but to enhance the human species.

All this is packed into a 160-page book (excluding notes), which is a welcome relief after the tendency to produced vast, over-written popular science titles. This is the kind of book that should be issued to every politician and civil servant involved in these kind of processes as a background read - short enough to have time to get through it, but detailed enough to really make the reader think and have a clear picture of what's involved. CRISPR has been around for a little while now and we've been lacking a concise book that covers its implications - we've got that now in this excellent title.

Paperback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge Introducing … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as … for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily, Introducing Artificial Intelligence is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

Search This Blog