CRACKING THE GENOME: Inside the Race to Unlock Human DNA.

• Author: Olson, Steve
• Position: Review

CRACKING THE GENOME: Inside the Race to Unlock Human DNA by Kevin Davies Free Press, $25.00

COULD A JOURNALIST WORKING entirely from news accounts write an effective history of the war in Vietnam before the fall of Saigon? That's the kind of task Kevin Davies has set himself in Cracking the Genome: Inside the Race to Unlock Human DNA. For the past 12 years, an international consortium has been methodically deriving the sequence of the 3 billion nucleotides that make up the human genome. The pace of sequencing picked up appreciably a few years ago when a U.S. company, Celera Genomics, vowed to do the job much faster, partly as a way to secure commercial rights to valuable genetic information.

Neither sequencing effort is finished. A hyped-up news conference last summer to celebrate the "completion" of the sequencing had more to do with politics, patenting, and the stock market than with science. Celera and the international genome project are both still filling in gaps and correcting errors. Given the difficulties that are anticipated in the final stages of sequencing, it will probably be necessary at some point to declare victory and walk away.

Davies does an excellent job of summarizing the last dozen years of genetics news. He has read everything he possibly can about James Watson, the co-discoverer with Francis Crick of the structure of DNA and the first director of the U.S. government's genome program; Francis Collins, a former University of Michigan researcher who took over the genome program in 1993; and Craig Venter, a researcher who left the National Institutes of Health to found first the privately funded Institute for Genomic Research and later Celera. Davies must have filing cabinets full of articles about the competition between the government and Celera, and the potential uses of sequence data. Unfortunately, the book reads more like a fantastically detailed clip job than like a coherent story.

Davies tries to put events in context but is prone to rampant overenthusiasm. Sequencing the genome is alternately described as a "staggering achievement," "the defining moment in the evolution of mankind," "the greatest adventure of modern science," and "the sacred birthright of humanity." It is compared to the invention of the wheel, the realization that the Earth goes around the sun, the Apollo moon landings, and finally understanding "the language of God" (to which I replied, in the margins of my copy of the book, "Not my God").

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