In the Beginning Was the Worm by Andrew Brown, Simon & Schuster, £15.99, ISBN 0743207165
ANDREW BROWN's pleasant new book traces the scientists whose discoveries over roughly forty-five years led to the monumental undertaking of the human genome sequencing project. The setting for much of Brown's story is the Max Perutz's famed laboratory of molecular biology in Cambridge. Many key players in British molecular biology worked there, including Sydney Brenner and John Sulston, last year's Nobel prizewinners for their work on sequencing the genome of the worm
Nobody set out in the 1950s to find the gene sequence of any organism, much less the sequence of the human genome. Rather, James Watson and Francis Crick's great elucidation of the structure of DNA in 1953 provided a vehicle for understanding how gene sequences supply the information to build ...
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