By George Church and Ed Regis
Basic Books, October 2012
George Church has been the consummate insider in genomic engineering ever since a 1970s “teenage version of myself” helped crack the 3-D structure of tRNA. Now, the Harvard professor, Human Genome Project principal, inventor, and serial bioentrepreneur teams up with science writer Ed Regis to tell the inside story of the race to understand and manipulate life “from the molecules up,” which they call “the sixth industrial revolution.” The result is an important and surprisingly accessible book, magisterially structured to intertwine the accelerated history of synthetic biology with its precedents in humanity’s earlier technological revolutions and in the epochal evolution of life itself. The book packs in a superb short course on life’s molecular workings, enabling the reader to grasp how we can actually contemplate resurrecting mammoths and Neanderthals, brewing biofuel from seawater and sunlight, engineering total immunity to viral ...
