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A carregar... Masterminds: Genius, DNA, and the Quest to Rewrite Lifepor David Ewing Duncan
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James Watson, J. Craig Venter, Francis Collins, Cynthia Kenyon . . . you may not know them, but you should. They are the masterminds of genetics and biotechnology who want you to live to be 150 years old, to regenerate your heart and brain, to create synthetic life. For better or worse, they are about to alter life on earth forever. Award-winning journalist David Ewing Duncan tells the remarkable stories of cutting-edge bioscientists, revealing their quirky, uniquely fascinating, sometimes vaguely unsettling personas as a means to understand their science and the astonishing implications of their work. This book seamlessly combines myth, biography, scholarship, and wit that poses the all-important question: Can we actually trust these masterminds? Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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Google Books — A carregar... GénerosSistema Decimal de Melvil (DDC)660.6Technology Chemical Technology Chemistry; Chemical Engineering BiotechnologyClassificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos EUA (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia:
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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. ( )