What do you know about genes?

Around a month ago I was thinking about what should I start reading next, I just finished reading some tech books and some pdfs about synthetic biology (something I will probably write in a later post), and I was debating between a genetic or psychology book. After a few internal debates, I chose this one: The Gene an Intimate History.

I have already been “playing” with genetics for a while so I wouldn’t expect to “learn” too much from this one as it didn’t seem to be so focused on the science part, more on the history of genetics but I was mistaken.

This book describes perfectly how we managed to know so many things about what life means, what we are formed from, the basic elements of life. It starts easily with Mendel experiments on pea plants (those who probably all of us learned in biology classes in schools and on who we didn’t pay lots of attention) and goes to the history of genetic experiments and how the structure of DNA was discovered (it has drama in it… never expected that).

It is perfect reading for those who are eager to learn more about genetics in general and it is not a hard read as it does not focus a lot on the actual science.

One of the quotes I saved:

Three profoundly destabilizing scientific ideas ricochet through the twentieth century, trisecting it into three unequal parts: the atom, the byte, the gene. Each is foreshadowed by an earlier century, but dazzles into full prominence in the twentieth. Each begins its life as a rather abstract scientific concept, but grows to invade multiple human discourses-thereby transforming culture, society, politics, and language. But the most crucial parallel between the three ideas, by far, is conceptual: each represents the irreducible unit — the building block, the basic organizational unit-of a larger whole: the atom, of matter; the byte of digitized information; the gene, of heredity and biological information.