Life Without Genes - Tapa blanda

Acerca del autor

Adrian Woolfson was educated in London, Cambridge and Oxford. He is a Wellcome Research Fellow at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge and the Charles and Katherine Darwin Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge.

’A welcome antidote to the naïve genetic determinism all too prevalent in popular science, and a pleasure to read. You have nothing to lose but your genes!’ IAN STEWART, author of Does God Play Dice? and Life’s Other Secret

De la contraportada

Can life exist without genes? What will living things be like in the future and how did life evolve in the first place? Taking us beyond biology, through ground-breaking analysis of all the genetic clues in each of us, Adrian Woolfson changes our view of the future forever. Might giraffes grow taller than skyscrapers? How could crocodiles stay underwater for more than hour? Is it possible to turn a stickleback into a daffodil, or a tiger into a porcupine? Woolfson asks us to imagine a hypermarket stocked with every possible type of toy in the universe, to see DNA as a infinitely flexible Lego and takes us on swirling Peter Pan-like trips through our own genes, showing us the full scope (and perils) of genetic engineering. A uniquely accessible work of science, with shades of Huxley, Lewis Carroll and Darwin, 'Life Without Genes' presents a truly startling vision of a future where the consequences of our current genetic experiments turn out to be both stranger and more foreign than we ever imagined.

'Lucid and entertaining…From Airfix kit-inspired, Just So stories to lucid descriptions of the work of the mathematician Ilya Prigogine, Woolfson is a virtuoso in full command of extraordinary material.'
SIMON INGS

'Five-woven from dreams, swooping around the outer edges of the imaginable, 'Life Without Genes' takes us to some mind-boggling conceptual spaces, conjuring into existence frightening Borgesian worlds, to make us question our assumptions about life…Communicating a sophisticated understanding of cutting-edge genetic research, Woolfson lifts Darwinian evolution free…wildly, ferally enjoyable.'
LISA GEE 'Scotland on Sunday'