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

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, ...

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here. We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...

Search This Blog