David Ewing Duncan

Points up the problem of writing comprehensibly about the frontiers of science . Duncan is not a scientist and it shows, he's an English Lit graduate, now a TV presenter. but even the humanities side of things is shaky.
The title already implies that science is a matter for individual geniuses, which it isn't. Each "Mastermind" is presented in a quick 1 or 2 sentence sketch ( along the lines of "he has a bald head or a quiff of hair and played top level basketball or goes white water rafting with his kids). Then it's overlaid with a mythic framework. This one is Zeus, or, for the only woman, of course, she's Eve. Even this he gets muddled. E.G. Craig Venter is Faust but gets mixed up with being the Devil who is quite a different sort of fellow. And one has a lab called Agincourt, which we are told is because it was a victory brought about by the newly invented longbow. The preceding battles of Crecy and Poitiers were also won by the longbow (seems the French were a bit slow to catch on)not to mention that Otzi the man in the ice carried a longbow 5000 years ago.

The science itself is there but makes little impact. And when there are such elementary errors in stuff I know about, I begin to wonder if the stuff I don't know so well is accurate.

That said, the portraits of Venter and Watson are quite lively, perhaps because they are more eccentric characters than most scientists.… (mais)