terrible.

As the last book published before he died in 2008, Michael oviously was torn between creating a novel or a non-fiction treatise on clonign and cellular usage. As a result of this dichotomy, he tried to do both, and wound up doing neither, putting out what arguably could be called the worst work of his life. ( )

Um livro panfletário com boas histórias, entretanto peca pou um excesso de pensonagens e uma clara linha narrativa deixando o leitor confuso em alguns momentos. ( )

This book is about biotechnology, genetics, organs and tissues and the ethical, moral, and legal issues related to it. There are about nine set of characters who interact with each other in numerous plots. The story begins with Vasco Borden, a fugitive-recovery agent trailing Eddie Tolman who is trying to sell twelve frozen transgenic embryos in liquid nitrogen from his embryology lab. Borden did not see anybody take the embryos but when he examined the dewar after Tolman's death, they were empty. Tolman locked himself in the kitchen service elevator and opened the dewar, killing himself with the liquid nitrogen gas. In the same building, Jack Watson, a capitalist was giving a speech, selling biotechnology to the world. He partly funds BioGen Research led by CEO Rick Diehl. BioGen has won the bid to clinically test the Burnet cell line licensed by UCLA. This cells were taken and cultured from Frank Burnet, a cured cancer patient whose cells produced powerful cancer-fighting chemicals called cytokines. In a courtroom, Frank Burnet is suing UCLA for using his tissues in research and selling them commercially. He is fighting for ownership rights and royalty fees over his cells and he loses the battle with his attorney daughter, Alex. Then a stranger approached him and suggested that he can still legally sell his blood for a hundred million dollars in case BioGen "contaminates" all their samples which kept him thinking. At the BioGen lab, Josh Winkler gets an urgent call from his Mom. He has to pick up his cocaine-addict brother Adam from jail and take him home. While he takes a leak at the gas station, Adam inhales the spray containing the retrovirus with the "maturity or aging" gene intended for the rats thinking it was something to get high on. Adam suddenly "matures", goes into rehab, and gets a decent job. Josh' Mom tells a lot of people and Josh gives it to Eric Graham, a friend. Josh' partner Tom Weller, gets a phone call informing him his Dad died. He calls sister Lisa who insists he is not her father. Lisa gets a paternity test from the frozen blood sample which comes out negative. Her Mom insists on tests of her own to counter Lisa. The test shows he might have been poisoned with a substance and that he had the gene for heart disease. Mrs. Weller decided to cremate the body to get rid of any evidence but she is surprised to learn it could not happen because the arm and leg bones were replaced with metal pipes. She sues the mortuary and Tom sues the lab because the public document led his insurance to cancel his policy after learning about the heart disease gene. Meanwhile, at the Radial Genomics at La Jolla, Henry Kendall receives a phone call from his former employer, National Institute of Health about a female chimpanzee, Mary, he was working with four years before. Mary's offspring, Dave, is transgenic, looks like a chimpanzee but talks like a human. They want to compare Dave's DNA with his. Henry kidnaps Dave and takes him home. His wife Lynn accepts him as his son and they come up with Gandler-Kreukheim syndrome, a genetic mutation to explain Dave's appearance to their children, Tracy and Jamie. Dave goes to school with them and gets into all kinds of trouble with his "chimp" behavior. There are more plots going on about a French talking orangutan, a turtle with a glowing shell, a talking parrot...and genes that are debated on...the sociability gene, the gay gene, the risk-taking gene. Towards the end of the book, Frank Burnet disappears while all BioGen's Burnet cell cultures gets contaminated. Diehl hires Borden to kidnap Alex and son Jamie to get fresh blood samples and the pursuit takes them to the Kendall's house. How is Alex and Jamie going to escape from this? And where is Frank when they needed him most? Adam Winkler grows old fast while Eric Graham dies of a heart attack at twenty-one years old. Josh finds out the hard way that the maturity gene is not working right? What is he going to go with the lawsuits that are sure to come? In the Kendall household, Dave is getting to be popular. How is the world going to take it? Will NIH spill the beans to the biotech world of the academe? If you are interested in genes and how it works, this book will explain a lot of things. ( )

Thought-provoking stuff that raises many questions about issues that arise in today's genetic industries, but the sheer amount of different plotlines and characters muddled the message.

http://stuff-ive-read.blogspot.com/20... ( )