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Author: Evelyn Fox KELLER
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674039432
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194
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Book Description
In a book that promises to change the way we think and talk about genes and genetic determinism, Evelyn Fox Keller, one of our most gifted historians and philosophers of science, provides a powerful, profound analysis of the achievements of genetics and molecular biology in the twentieth century, the century of the gene. Not just a chronicle of biology’s progress from gene to genome in one hundred years, The Century of the Gene also calls our attention to the surprising ways these advances challenge the familiar picture of the gene most of us still entertain. Keller shows us that the very successes that have stirred our imagination have also radically undermined the primacy of the gene—word and object—as the core explanatory concept of heredity and development. She argues that we need a new vocabulary that includes concepts such as robustness, fidelity, and evolvability. But more than a new vocabulary, a new awareness is absolutely crucial: that understanding the components of a system (be they individual genes, proteins, or even molecules) may tell us little about the interactions among these components. With the Human Genome Project nearing its first and most publicized goal, biologists are coming to realize that they have reached not the end of biology but the beginning of a new era. Indeed, Keller predicts that in the new century we will witness another Cambrian era, this time in new forms of biological thought rather than in new forms of biological life.
Author: Evelyn Fox KELLER
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674039432
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194
Get Book Here
Book Description
In a book that promises to change the way we think and talk about genes and genetic determinism, Evelyn Fox Keller, one of our most gifted historians and philosophers of science, provides a powerful, profound analysis of the achievements of genetics and molecular biology in the twentieth century, the century of the gene. Not just a chronicle of biology’s progress from gene to genome in one hundred years, The Century of the Gene also calls our attention to the surprising ways these advances challenge the familiar picture of the gene most of us still entertain. Keller shows us that the very successes that have stirred our imagination have also radically undermined the primacy of the gene—word and object—as the core explanatory concept of heredity and development. She argues that we need a new vocabulary that includes concepts such as robustness, fidelity, and evolvability. But more than a new vocabulary, a new awareness is absolutely crucial: that understanding the components of a system (be they individual genes, proteins, or even molecules) may tell us little about the interactions among these components. With the Human Genome Project nearing its first and most publicized goal, biologists are coming to realize that they have reached not the end of biology but the beginning of a new era. Indeed, Keller predicts that in the new century we will witness another Cambrian era, this time in new forms of biological thought rather than in new forms of biological life.
Author: Siddhartha Mukherjee
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476733538
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 624
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Book Description
The #1 NEW YORK TIMES Bestseller The basis for the PBS Ken Burns Documentary The Gene: An Intimate History Now includes an excerpt from Siddhartha Mukherjee’s new book Song of the Cell! From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies—a fascinating history of the gene and “a magisterial account of how human minds have laboriously, ingeniously picked apart what makes us tick” (Elle). “Sid Mukherjee has the uncanny ability to bring together science, history, and the future in a way that is understandable and riveting, guiding us through both time and the mystery of life itself.” —Ken Burns “Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee dazzled readers with his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies in 2010. That achievement was evidently just a warm-up for his virtuoso performance in The Gene: An Intimate History, in which he braids science, history, and memoir into an epic with all the range and biblical thunder of Paradise Lost” (The New York Times). In this biography Mukherjee brings to life the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices. “Mukherjee expresses abstract intellectual ideas through emotional stories…[and] swaddles his medical rigor with rhapsodic tenderness, surprising vulnerability, and occasional flashes of pure poetry” (The Washington Post). Throughout, the story of Mukherjee’s own family—with its tragic and bewildering history of mental illness—reminds us of the questions that hang over our ability to translate the science of genetics from the laboratory to the real world. In riveting and dramatic prose, he describes the centuries of research and experimentation—from Aristotle and Pythagoras to Mendel and Darwin, from Boveri and Morgan to Crick, Watson and Franklin, all the way through the revolutionary twenty-first century innovators who mapped the human genome. “A fascinating and often sobering history of how humans came to understand the roles of genes in making us who we are—and what our manipulation of those genes might mean for our future” (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel), The Gene is the revelatory and magisterial history of a scientific idea coming to life, the most crucial science of our time, intimately explained by a master. “The Gene is a book we all should read” (USA TODAY).
Author: Celeste Michelle Condit
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299163648
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
The Meanings of the Gene is a compelling look at societal hopes and fears about genetics in the course of the twentieth century. The work of scientists and doctors in advancing genetic research and its applications has been accompanied by plenty of discussion in the popular press—from Good Housekeeping and Forbes to Ms. and the Congressional Record—about such topics as eugenics, sterilization, DNA, genetic counseling, and sex selection. By demonstrating the role of rhetoric and ideology in public discussions about genetics, Condit raises the controversial question, Who shapes decisions about genetic research and its consequences for humans—scientists, or the public? Analyzing hundreds of stories from American magazines—and, later, television news—from the 1910s to the 1990s, Condit identifies three central and enduring public worries about genetics: that genes are deterministic arbiters of human fate; that genetics research can be used for discriminatory ends; and that advances in genetics encourage perfectionistic thinking about our children. Other key public concerns that Condit highlights are the complexity of genetic decision-making and potential for invasion of privacy; conflict over the human genetic code and experimentation with DNA; and family genetics and reproductive decisions. Her analysis reveals a persistent debate in the popular media between themes of genetic determinism (such as eugenics) and more egalitarian views that place genes within the complexity of biological and social life. The Meanings of the Gene offers an insightful view of our continuing efforts to grapple with our biological natures and to define what it means, and will mean in the future, to be human.
Author: Moyra Smith
Publisher: Academic Press
ISBN: 0128196130
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 424
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Book Description
Gene Environment Interactions: Nature and Nurture in the Twenty-first Century offers a rare, synergistic view of ongoing revelations in gene environment interaction studies, drawing together key themes from epigenetics, microbiomics, disease etiology, and toxicology to illuminate pathways for clinical translation and the paradigm shift towards precision medicine. Across eleven chapters, Dr. Smith discusses interactions with the environment, human adaptations to environmental stimuli, pathogen encounters across the centuries, epigenetic modulation of gene expression, transgenerational inheritance, the microbiome's intrinsic effects on human health, and the gene-environment etiology of cardiovascular, metabolic, psychiatric, behavioral and monogenic disorders. Later chapters illuminate how our new understanding of gene environment interactions are driving advances in precision medicine and novel treatments. In addition, the book's author shares strategies to support clinical translation of these scientific findings to improve heath literacy among the general population.
Author: Jeremy Rifkin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780753809358
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Author: Hans-Jörg Rheinberger
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022647478X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 156
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Book Description
Few concepts played a more important role in twentieth-century life sciences than that of the gene. Yet at this moment, the field of genetics is undergoing radical conceptual transformation, and some scientists are questioning the very usefulness of the concept of the gene, arguing instead for more systemic perspectives. The time could not be better, therefore, for Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and Staffan Müller-Wille's magisterial history of the concept of the gene. Though the gene has long been the central organizing theme of biology, both conceptually and as an object of study, Rheinberger and Müller-Wille conclude that we have never even had a universally accepted, stable definition of it. Rather, the concept has been in continual flux—a state that, they contend, is typical of historically important and productive scientific concepts. It is that very openness to change and manipulation, the authors argue, that made it so useful: its very mutability enabled it to be useful while the technologies and approaches used to study and theorize about it changed dramatically.
Author: Robert Plomin
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262537982
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Book Description
A top behavioral geneticist makes the case that DNA inherited from our parents at the moment of conception can predict our psychological strengths and weaknesses. In Blueprint, behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin describes how the DNA revolution has made DNA personal by giving us the power to predict our psychological strengths and weaknesses from birth. A century of genetic research shows that DNA differences inherited from our parents are the consistent lifelong sources of our psychological individuality—the blueprint that makes us who we are. Plomin reports that genetics explains more about the psychological differences among people than all other factors combined. Nature, not nurture, is what makes us who we are. Plomin explores the implications of these findings, drawing some provocative conclusions—among them that parenting styles don't really affect children's outcomes once genetics is taken into effect. This book offers readers a unique insider's view of the exciting synergies that came from combining genetics and psychology. The paperback edition has a new afterword by the author.
Author: Jessica Wapner
Publisher: The Experiment, LLC
ISBN: 1615191658
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 345
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Book Description
One of The Wall Street Journal’s 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Year Philadelphia, 1959: A scientist scrutinizing a single human cell under a microscope detects a missing piece of DNA. That scientist, David Hungerford, had no way of knowing that he had stumbled upon the starting point of modern cancer research— the Philadelphia chromosome. It would take doctors and researchers around the world more than three decades to unravel the implications of this landmark discovery. In 1990, the Philadelphia chromosome was recognized as the sole cause of a deadly blood cancer, chronic myeloid leukemia, or CML. Cancer research would never be the same. Science journalist Jessica Wapner reconstructs more than forty years of crucial breakthroughs, clearly explains the science behind them, and pays tribute—with extensive original reporting, including more than thirty-five interviews—to the dozens of researchers, doctors, and patients with a direct role in this inspirational story. Their curiosity and determination would ultimately lead to a lifesaving treatment unlike anything before it. The Philadelphia Chromosome chronicles the remarkable change of fortune for the more than 70,000 people worldwide who are diagnosed with CML each year. It is a celebration of a rare triumph in the battle against cancer and a blueprint for future research, as doctors and scientists race to uncover and treat the genetic roots of a wide range of cancers.
Author: Nicolas Rasmussen
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421413418
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
The scientific scramble to discover the first generation of drugs created through genetic engineering. The biotech arena emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, when molecular biology, one of the fastest-moving areas of basic science in the twentieth century, met the business world. Gene Jockeys is a detailed study of the biotech projects that led to five of the first ten recombinant DNA drugs to be approved for medical use in the United States: human insulin, human growth hormone, alpha interferon, erythropoietin, and tissue plasminogen activator. Drawing on corporate documents obtained from patent litigation, as well as interviews with the ambitious biologists who called themselves gene jockeys, historian Nicolas Rasmussen chronicles the remarkable, and often secretive, work of the scientists who built a new domain between academia and the drug industry in the pursuit of intellectual rewards and big payouts. In contrast to some who critique the rise of biotechnology, Rasmussen contends that biotech was not a swindle, even if the public did pay a very high price for the development of what began as public scientific resources. Within the biotech enterprise, the work of corporate scientists went well beyond what biologists had already accomplished within universities, and it accelerated the medical use of the new drugs by several years. In his technically detailed and readable narrative, Rasmussen focuses on the visible and often heavy hands that construct and maintain the markets in public goods like science. He looks closely at how science follows money, and vice versa, as researchers respond to the pressures and potential rewards of commercially viable innovations. In biotechnology, many of those engaged in crafting markets for genetically engineered drugs were biologists themselves who were in fact trying to do science. This book captures that heady, fleeting moment when a biologist could expect to do great science through the private sector and be rewarded with both wealth and scientific acclaim.
Author: Austin BURT
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674029119
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 613
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Book Description
Covering all species from yeast to humans, this is the first book to tell the story of selfish genetic elements that act narrowly to advance their own replication at the expense of the larger organism.
