THE YEAR OF THE GENOME: A Diary of the Biological Revolution

Weissmann, a medical professor at New York University School of Medicine, aims to capture a year in science—particularly genetic research—"with a wide-angle lens." In entries starting in October 2001 and going backwards to April 2000, he sets the Human Genome Project against a backdrop of what he calls "news of disease and unreason," tracing the year's science headlines, which included outbreaks of Ebola virus, typhus, mad cow disease and anthrax; advances in cloning; a stem-cell research flap in Congress; and new progress against Alzheimer's, leukemia, Parkinson's disease and AIDS. Weissmann views science as an ideological quarrel in which medical research is a revolution in progress, and the specter of totalitarianism lurks behind most objections to genetic engineering or RU-486. He weighs in vociferously on the 2000 election (likening Ralph Nader to the German Communists of 1932 who collaborated with the Nazis) and its negative implications for research. Weissmann himself is especially fond of science that bolsters his political sentiments, such as the discovery by NASA that life on earth could have been seeded by "immigrant" life from space that "arrived much in the way most Americans arrived in the New World, as steerage passengers from teeming shores." Weissmann is articulate and erudite, and he lucidly distills scientific concepts for the layman. Yet while his humanism is well intentioned, his words so often come off as smug and self-righteous that many readers are bound to be turned off. (May)