Jacob’s Ladder: The history of the human genome by Henry Gee, Fourth Estate/W. W. Norton, £20/$25.95, ISBN 1841157341/0393050831
IF YOU believed the hype, the sequencing of the human genome would finally tell us how babies come from fertilised eggs and, more generally, what it is to be human. Henry Gee, very sensibly, doesn’t buy it. It is not that the sequencing of the human genome is not a major landmark. It is just that the sequence of As, Cs, Ts and Gs in themselves will not tell us that much about ourselves.
What is the origin of the idea that…
