The Misunderstood Gene by Michel Morange, Harvard University Press,
$24.95, ISBN 0674003365
MICHEL MORANGE combines his professorship in biology with directing the
Centre for the Study of the History of Science in Paris. So he has an unusually
broad take on the current enthusiasm for identifying genes for
everything—from specific diseases to vague behavioural tendencies.
The word “gene” still means different things to evolutionary biologists and
to developmental biologists. For the former it is an abstract accounting unit,
while for the latter it is about the control of the programmed transcription and
translation which results in the synthesis of…
