Overview

The mystery of inheritance has captivated thinkers since antiquity, and the unlocking of this mystery - the development of classical genetics - is one of humanity's greatest achievements. This great scientific and human drama is the story told fully and for the first time in this book.Acclaimed science writer James Schwartz presents the history of genetics through the eyes of a dozen or so central players, beginning with Charles Darwin and ending with Nobel laureate Hermann J. Muller. In tracing the emerging idea of the gene, Schwartz deconstructs many often-told stories that were meant to reflect glory on the participants and finds that the official version of discovery often hides a far more complex and illuminating narrative. The discovery of the structure of DNA and the more recent advances in genome science represent the culmination of one hundred years of concentrated inquiry into the nature of the gene. Schwartz's multifaceted training as a mathematician, geneticist, and writer enables him to provide a remarkably lucid account of the development of the central ideas about heredity, and at the same time bring to life the brilliant and often eccentric individuals who shaped these ideas.In the spirit of the late Stephen Jay Gould, this book offers a thoroughly engaging story about one of the oldest and most controversial fields of scientific inquiry. It offers readers the background they need to understand the latest findings in genetics and those still to come in the search for the genetic basis of complex diseases and traits.

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9780674026704

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Reviews

Often described as a noble quest for the truth, science can also be messy and duplicitous--never more so, as this book reveals, than in the search for the key to heredity, the gene. Yet rarely has science involved such inspiring and passionate figures--Mendel, Bateson, Morgan, Muller--whose names we may recognize but whose personal tales are relatively little told. Here is the 100-year story of genetics with the setbacks and breakthroughs carefully explained, and the human story--including spells in Soviet prison camps and suicide attempts--thrillingly evoked. -- Rowan Hooper New Scientist (05/17/2008)

A scholarly history of genetics.Science writer Schwartz first focuses on the early days, beginning with Darwin's pangenesis theory, whereby physical particles in the bloodstream were thought to embody hereditable traits. The author then proceeds to Darwin's half first cousin Francis Galton, who dismissed pangenesis, espousing eugenics as the way to improve the human race through selective breeding. Galton's contributions to statistics also led him to believe that evolution could not proceed gradually, but required sports - mutations to alter hereditary factors. In turn, Galton's disciples would champion mutational theory, opposing the rules of inheritance developed by Mendel and rediscovered by the turn of the 20th century. Schwartz's sketches of the lives of Mendel, of his rediscoverer William Bateson and of Mendelism critics Hugo De Vries and Bateson's once-best friend W.F.R. Weldon are gems of melodrama framing the complex breeding experiments each side conducted. But the drama really heats up when the focus changes from Europe to America and the celebrated studies of fruit flies in the Columbia laboratory of T.H. Morgan, who emerges as vain, quixotic, stubborn and quick to take all the credit, all the while inspiring students. Out of the fly group would emerge Hermann Muller, whose flashes of insight, ingenious crossing experiments and use of X-rays to induce mutations would resolve many results that seemed to challenge Mendel's laws, and in the end demonstrate their validity. Muller's extremes of behavior - he embraced both communism and eugenics - have clouded his reputation, but the biographical details Schwartz provides are restorative. They point to a brilliance and prescience that merited Muller's Nobel Prize in 1946, as well as to an emotional life and idealism that led to an almost successful suicide. Schwartz concludes with an epilogue that brings genetics research up to date.Occasionally dense, but the rewards in viewing science as a passionate pursuit that self-corrects over time make this book worth sticking with. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

James Schwartz is an independent scholar and writer living in Brookline, Massachusetts.

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