Volume 39, Number 10 · May 28, 1992
The Dream of the Human Genome
By Richard C. Lewontin
BOOKS REVIEWED IN THIS ESSAY
The Code of Codes: Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project
edited by Daniel J. Kevles, edited by Leroy Hood
Harvard University Press, 397 pp., $29.95
Mapping the Code: The Human Genome Project and the Choices of Modern Science
by Joel Davis
Wiley, 294 pp., $19.95
Mapping Our Genes: The Genome Project and the Future of Medicine
by Lois Wingerson
Plume, 338 pp., $9.95 (paper)
Genethics: The Ethics of Engineering Life
by David Suzuki, by Peter Knudtson
Harvard University Press, 372 pp., $12.95 (paper)
Mapping and Sequencing the Human Genome
Committee on Mapping and Sequencing the Human Genome
National Academy Press, 116 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Genome: The Story of the Most Astonishing Scientific Adventure of Our Time—The Attempt to Map All the Genes in the Human Body
by Jerry E. Bishop, by Michael Waldholz
Simon and Schuster, 352 pp., $10.95 (paper)
Exons, Introns, and Talking Genes: The Science Behind the Human Genome Project
by Christopher Wills
Basic Books, 368 pp., $23.00
Dangerous Diagnostics: The Social Power of Biological Information
by Dorothy Nelkin, by Laurence Tancredi
Basic Books, 207 pp., $10.95 (paper)
DNA Technology in Forensic Science
Committee on DNA Technology in Forensic Science
National Academy Press, 200 pp., $24.95 (prepublication copy)
Scientists are public figures, and like other public figures with a sense of their own importance, they self-consciously compare themselves and their work to past monuments of culture and history. Modern biology, especially molecular biology, has undergone two such episodes of preening before the glass of history. The first, characteristic of a newly developing field that promises to solve important problems that have long resisted the methods of an older tradition, has used the metaphor of revolution. Tocqueville observed that when the bourgeois monarchy was overthrown on February 24, 1848, the Deputies compared themselves consciously to the 'Girondins' and the 'Montagnards' of the National Convention of 1793.
Review, 10184 words
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