My final entry in the "biography" category is technically historical fiction. The popular book Remarkable Creatures, by Tracy Chevalier, envisions the life of fossil-hunter Mary Anning, who combed the shoreline of her native Lyme Regis and uncovered fossils of large, extinct marine reptiles, the ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs. Anning's discoveries revolutionized thinking in the early 19th century about the age of the earth and proved that creatures could become extinct, as radical a concept at that time as the evolution of new species. This story is so fascinating that it prompted one of our book club members to make a pilgrimage to Lyme Regis while visiting the UK. Indeed, even a visit to London's Natural History Museum will bring you up close and personal with Mary Anning and some of these fossils.
Fiction
My book club and I are always on the lookout for works of fiction in which some aspect of genetics (or science, more generally) drives the plot. Unfortunately, many of these reads are unsatisfying to me; some are poorly researched or simply implausible, others are clearly fictionalized versions of actual events, yet pale in comparison to their real life stories. I must also sheepishly confess that I am not a fan of the "science fiction" genre; I know I am in the minority in this aversion, and surely other PLOS editors will extol their favorite sci-fi reads in future columns.
Occasionally, however, a novelist develops a character who suffers from a disorder which springs from a genetic or epigenetic perturbation, and from these challenges, a plot emerges. For me, as a human geneticist, some of these portrayals can be vivid, and here I recommend three examples. First is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, by Mark Haddon, who conveys the terror and determination of an autistic teenager struggling to find the murderer of a neighbor's dog. Heads up for those of you in or near London: do not miss the National Theatre's clever and moving production of a play based on this book. Second is Mendel's Dwarf, by Simon Mawer, who tells two parallel stories: one is of the monk Gregor Mendel and his peas (we are right there in his cloistered garden with him), the other is of Mendel's distant relative, a scientist who searches for the genetic explanation for his hereditary dwarfism known as achondroplasia. Third is Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, an epic tale of Greek immigrants, the tumultuous Detroit in the '60s, and finally the genetic misfortune of Cal, born as a "girl," but who upon adolescence discovers himself to be male, with a 46XY disorder of sexual development. Eugenides, whether he was conscious of it or not, throws out a red herring early in the plot, in which Cal's grandparents are actually brother and sister, whereas from a genetic point of view, it would have been more logical to have his parents as the first degree relatives. I forgave him this confusion because the book is so good. It is worth mentioning that one of the main characters in Eugenides' latest work, The Marriage Plot, suffers from bipolar disorder, and this depiction, too, is compelling. Our book club read the latter because it has a Woods Hole/Cold Spring Harbor sub-plot, complete with yeast genetics and a Barbara McClintock-esque character, but these brief threads, to our disappointment, went nowhere.
Nonfiction
And now for a quick dip into a science nonfiction grab bag of delights. In Napoleon's Buttons, co-written by Penny Le Couteur and Jay Burreson, history meets chemistry as we learn how sugar, caffeine, dyes, tin, and a variety of other molecules shaped the course of human endeavor. Chemicals are also front and center in The Poisoner's Handbook, an engaging inspection of murders and accidental deaths in prohibition-era New York City and the emergence of the forensic science needed to pinpoint the culprits. I thoroughly enjoyed Your Inner Fish, by Neil Shubin, who illustrates how the seeming illogic of human anatomy reveals the vestiges of evolution. If paleoanthropology interests you — and how can it not — look for Ancestral Passions, by Virginia Morell, who traces the indefatigable Leakey family in their multi-generational search for human ancestors; I am not a "night" person, but this tale had me turning pages way past midnight several nights in a row, and Olduvai Gorge is now on my bucket list. In the brilliant The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee takes us through the history of cancer awareness and its treatment; the descriptions of early breast cancer surgeries are particularly difficult to contemplate and the work of Sidney Farber was thrilling to read. And the Band Played On, by Randy Shilts, who was a journalist with the San Francisco Chronicle, is an unrelenting exposé on both the political mayhem and the dogged quest to solve an urgent medical mystery at the emergence of the AIDS epidemic.
But wait, there is more! In his tour de force The Eighth Day of Creation, Horace Freeland Judson chronicles two decades that form the dawn of molecular biology, and his extensive interviews allow us to hear the participants' voices; I was most intrigued by the section centered on the Institut Pasteur, in which a small number of gripping and intimately connected individuals started with very simple questions about bacteriophage biology and sugar metabolism and ended up discovering gene regulation and the operon. Stephen Hall picks up the pulse of molecular biology in the late 1970s in Invisible Frontiers, a fast-paced account of the bicoastal race to clone the human insulin gene at the birth of the biotechnology industry amid the recombinant DNA moratorium; this was a particularly fun read for me, as I happened to know many of the participants in the story, but I think that anyone with an interest in that pivotal technology would enjoy it. Miss Leavitt's Stars, by George Johnson, is a delightful and illuminating story about the cosmos; it is part biography and part explanation of how Henrietta Leavitt, one of a cluster of female "human computers" who calculated star brightness from large photographic plates at the turn of the 20th century, discovered a relationship between the brightness and the periodicity of "variable" stars and correctly interpreted that their absolute luminosity could then be used as a standard candle to measure the distance to other stars. Dava Sobel's Longitude tells the 18th century tale of the exasperating competition to accurately calculate longitude at sea; I found the story of Harrison and his exquisite clocks so interesting that I had to see them at the Greenwich Royal Observatory. Finally, I bow to Richard Rhodes, author of my all-time favorite science narrative The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Do not be intimidated by a little nuclear physics! This book is a lucid page-turner: the story is both magnificent, speaking to the genius and industry of men and women working under the incredible pressure of war, as well as terrifying in its implications, and we feel the tension in it.
I close with a teaser for a great genetics read, In Pursuit of the Gene, and shameless promotion for my next interview, to be published in early 2014, with its author James Schwartz. Go out and grab a copy, and until then, keep those pages turning!
*Jane Gitschier is a human geneticist and Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco. She has served as the Interviews Editor for PLOS Genetics since its inception in 2005 and in that capacity has published 35 interviews of geneticists and others whose work dovetails with genetics. Jane has run a genetics book club for the past 10 years or so, and shares here a selection of her favorite reads.
Citation: Gitschier J (2013) Recommendations from Jane Gitschier's Bookshelf. PLoS Genet 9(12): e1004009. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1004009. Published: December 5, 2013
Copyright: © 2013 Jane Gitschier. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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