LIFE SCRIPT: How the Human Genome Discoveries Will Transform Medicine and Enhance Your Health.

• Author: LONGMAN, PHILLIP J.
• Position: Review

LIFE SCRIPT: How the Human Genome Discoveries Will Transform Medicine and Enhance Your Health by Nicholas Wade Simon & Schuster, $24.00

TO HEAR NICHOLAS WADE TELL IT, June 26, 2000, marked "the beginning of a new era of medicine." That was the day President Bill Clinton, speaking in the East Room of the White House, announced that biologists had completed a first survey of the 3 billion DNA letters, or sequences, that define the human genome. Clinton compared this accomplishment to "learning the language in which God created life." Wade, with only slightly less rhetorical flourish, assures us that the sequencing of the human genome "provides the basis on which to understand the human body almost as fully and precisely as an engineer understands a machine."

From that understanding, Wade continues, "physicians can hope to develop new ways to fix the human machine and in time to correct most--perhaps almost all--of its defects" Before long, these future fixes might even allow humans to become "effectively immortal," he concludes, speculating that people endowed with such potential might want to separate themselves from lesser beings by establishing a society of Methuselahs on Mars.

If you've just returned from a long visit to Mars, you might be shocked to find a journeyman science writer and editor for The New York Times carrying on with such sci-fi themes. But Wade is hardly alone in his estimation of how profoundly the revolution in genetics will affect the practice of medicine. Controversies rage over who owns the information contained in the human genome, and over the ethics of cloning, gene-therapy trials, and most recently embryonic stem-cell research. But implicit in all these debates is a widespread assumption that genetic research holds the potential not only to produce miracle cures for major diseases, but to prolong the human life span significantly, if not indefinitely. From President Bush, who promises to fund a "medical moon-shot" (even at the expense of federal investment in physics and space exploration) to the man in the street, who hears each day that biologists have discovered a "gene for breast cancer," or a "gene for shyness," the conviction grows throughout the culture that genetics hold the ultimate explanation for most human afflictions, whether physical or mental. Would that it were true.

For those who have failed to keep up with their newspapers, Life Script provides a useful and up-to-date survey of the biomedical headlines you may have missed in recent years. Early chapters rehash the colorful clash between James D. Watson of the National Institutes of Health's Human Genome Project, and J. Craig Venter, the National Institute of Health (NIH) scientist who broke away to undertake his own privately funded quest to map the human genome. Later, Wade introduces...