In the Beginning Was the Worm by Andrew Brown, Simon & Schuster, 拢15.99, ISBN 0743207165 Reviewed by Mark Pagel
ANDREW BROWN鈥檚 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鈥檚 story is the Max Perutz鈥檚 famed laboratory of molecular biology in Cambridge. Many key players in British molecular biology worked there, including Sydney Brenner and John Sulston, last year鈥檚 Nobel prizewinners for their work on sequencing the genome of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans, mercifully known to biologists as C. elegans.
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鈥檚 great elucidation of the structure of DNA in 1953 provided a vehicle for understanding how gene sequences supply the information to build organisms. During the next ten years scientists, some working at the LMB, eventually deduced how the linear string of nucleotides that makes up DNA specifies 鈥渃odons鈥�, which in turn specify the amino acids making up all of the different proteins that combine together to make a body 鈥� the genetic code had finally been cracked.
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Once the players at the LMB had glimpsed the power of the genetic code, they redoubled their efforts to find how animals develop from simple cells to complicated adults. Understanding development meant understanding lots of proteins, and it was this that drove the initial gene-sequencing efforts. C. elegans emerged, but only after many false starts, as a practical model organism. Brown methodically reveals how it took three more decades of often supremely tedious work with C. elegans to accumulate the genetic expertise, databases, computer software, collaborations and gene-sequencing methods that made it possible to identify the entire 3.3 billion nucleotides that form the sequence of the human genome.
Brown鈥檚 scientists tend to be heroic and brilliant people who labour in cramped conditions with no desks of their own, no bookshelves, and limited access to telephones. There is a tendency in British science journalism to make a virtue of deprivation, reflecting perhaps a cultural reverse snobbery that genius triumphs over fancy and comfortable labs when it comes to advancing science. But there is not a shred of evidence to support this view, and given the general under-funding of many British science laboratories it is time this little cultural homily was quietly forgotten.
Happily, none of this detracts from Brown鈥檚 narrative which is scientifically accurate and rolls along at an enjoyable pace. Reading In the Beginning Was the Worm will give you a remarkably good understanding of the painstaking efforts that made the current genomics and bioinformatics revolutions possible.