Introducing Genetics

by Steve Jones and Borin Van Loon

Book Overview

Genetics is the newest of all sciences - nothing useful was known about inheritance until just over a century ago. Now genetics is exploding, and before long we will have the complete code, written in... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1840461209
• ISBN13: 9781840461206
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: Totem Books
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.6" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Excellent Book

I thought this was a great especially for those that are in highschool biology or in genetics and thinking about a future as a geneticists.

DEOXYRIBOSE NUCLEIC ACID, G.C.T.A. AND H.Y.P.E.

This 2005 edition may exhibit an updated text. My own copy of the book is a 2001 reprint of the original text from 1993, and one thing that struck me as I read it was that over those 8 years there appeared to have been no changes made. Not only is genetics a very modern science, its profile has risen spectacularly within the scientific community over a period of not many years, so I expect there must have been a fair amount of updating to do. Nevertheless this is explicitly a book for beginners, the approach taken is chronological in recounting the successive discoveries, the author is a leading and eminent expert who presumably would not have countenanced reprints of any statements he wished to retract, so I have to suppose that the text as I have it remains valid as far as it goes. We beginners have to begin at the beginning, this is the beginning, reviews here are almost non-existent, and it may be helpful in that case if I give my fellow neophytes some idea of what to expect, even if I am not fully up to date. Professor Steve Jones of University College London is well known, at least in Britain, from television. Everyone has heard of DNA these days even if they do not know what those letters stand for (see my caption above). We have clearly opened another Pandora's box by dabbling in this matter, and in my edition Jones concludes by touching on the ethical and political issues that our new discoveries raise. Whatever additions or amendments he may have added in retrospect, his remarks reflect his mindset, which is level-headed and humane, and his media appearances have not suggested to me that he has espoused any significantly new views in these respects. The main narrative is historical, in the simple chronological sense. Jones really starts with Mendel and his experiments on peas, having given Darwin only a cursory mention before that. Other major figures are given what I take to be their due mention, the main actors are, expectedly, Crick and Watson the discoverers of the double helix, and subsequent research is also noted in my edition up to `the 1990's'. The picture I gained was much what I would have thought - advances in research have shown the matter to be enormously more complex than even Crick and Watson, let alone Mendel, envisaged. However the basic models that these pioneers created seem to have stood the test of time and look likely to continue to. The tedious debate over creationism is mercifully ignored, although the author readily admits that the phenomenon of being alive, whereby living tissue creates new tissue, remains a mystery, at least so far. Science can now trace the processes at work in detail, but what these processes ultimately are seems unidentified. The original text is credited to not just Steve Jones but also to the illustrator Borin Van Loon [sic]. Every page from start to finish, or at least until we reach Jones's `footnote', is larded with illustrative matter, mostly cartoons. Whether some readers may f

In my opinion, the "Introducing" series are well worth the money

I've read several in the series, I'd give the Genetics book 5 stars. I'm no where near a Genetics expert, so I can't comment on the correctness of the work, but I did get quite a lot out of it.