eBook Art of Genes -Lib download

As a High School student, I made many an inquiry into the very questions that this text (and other more recently published texts) seeks to answer or to explain. I was rebuffed by many a teacher then as well as in my later colligiate days as if I had asked something absurd like "what is God made of?" . Yet, just the street from my home as a youth, Kornberg was working on the elucidation of DNA Polymerase and across the pond, Watson and Crick were on the verge of deciphering the enigmatic DNA molecule. All this excitement and still, no real answers for nearly fifty years. This book by Coen is an absolutely wonderfully well composed and well written text that elucidates in great depth the real mystery that is the product of our genes. No longer concerned with the humdrum mechanics and mere architecture of DNA, it reveals the real magic and dynamics of the stuff that has for so long eluded such inquiring minds as my own. As a former research Microbiologist and avocational artist, I found E.Coen's analogy a genuinely perfect metaphor for representing the dynamics of the gene. I have reviewed many similar texts, each of which were excellent in their approach to this subject but I choose this text as a particularly marvelous text for both the professional and layperson alike to read for a comprehensive understanding of the true miracle of living matter.

This is a nice non-technical introduction to developmental biology, with some interesting historical insights. I agree with a previous reviewer in that the "painting" analogy used by the author is a bit far-fetched and tends to confuse
rather than clarify the subject. In any case, after reading this book I feel better equiped to prepared to face a more technical book, like Sean Caroll's "DNA and diversity".

Charming and clear introduction to the basic 'how to' of development with a lot of information about hox genes in relation to form and function, with an engaging twist, the questions of art from symmetry to creativity. This is the best short introduction to very recent findings in a field transformed in the eighties and only now becoming public knowldege.

This book takes on one of the big mysteries: how does each animal or plant (or fungus!) turn a single fertilized egg cell into its convoluted, differentiated self? Understanding of development is new and still partial. Over the last twenty years or so scientists have been able to piece together the way certain well-studied organisms (the noble fruit fly, of course, the snapdragon, and a couple others) come to become from a single cell, how a growing body finds its orientation, its myriad internal shapes and differences, without any guiding intelligence. As we see this story unfold, we must again sit back in simple awe at the astronomical possibilities of protein, which makes the tools, the materials, the very jigs and benches where life comes together.

Coen does a good job in taking us on a tour of the issues that will be in play here. Biologists have been struggling for a long time with development, but it is only with the sophistication of modern chemical analysis and the viewpoint of DNA, RNA, and protein machines that the marvelous self-direction of the mechanism is starting to become evident. Amazingly, the flows of proteins from cell to cell via interdicting membranes, the interactions between proteins in one cell and those in another, the ability of a protein to change another, and -- singly or in combination -- to turn on or off specific genes (that do themselves make proteins that may furher elaborate this process) are sufficiently rich methods to build a body. Clearly such an assertion requires much detailed explication, and the author does provide this. But here I think he goes wrong by introducing an analogy to explain development.

The author chooses to bring in the idea of an artist painting a picture as a help to understanding the way an organism builds itself from a single cell. There is, in fact, very little about the way an artist makes a picture that resembles development, except perhaps the notion of progressive refinement. However, none daunted, he introduces "colors" to describe the presence of one or another Master Proteins, and "scents" to describe the effect of certain membrane proteins on the Master Proteins in contacting cells. These colors and scents dominate the discussion thereafter, but must, naturally, be briefly dispensed with here and there as he describes the actual mechanisms in terms of molecules, but then up they pop again.

There is nothing gained by this artificial isomorphism of color for molecule and scent for effect. An analogy, to be of some use, must give the mind a familiar structure as a map to an unfamiliar one. The spread of "colors" and "scents" along the segments of a developing fruit fly or diffusing dorsally/ventrally in a flower bud does not add anything. It actually requires an extra step to translate these colors back into the molecular populations they really are. This picture of molecules diffusing through a body is the conceptually simpler, as well as being, more or less, the actual.

As the book went on I found the discussions of symmetry and handedness to be protracted, and the conclusions drawn interesting but rather muffled by that leisureliness. Explanations of shape and proportion and of how particular patterns arise during growth were too vague, and lost in the talk of painters and painting. Certainly there is much interesting material in this book, but to a very great extent it can stand on its own. Let the occasional painting metaphor season the narrative rather than provide the main ingredient.

(OBSOLESCENCE CAVEAT: apparently the role of RNA in genetic regulation is just now starting to be appreciated. At the time Coen wrote, none of that was even suspected.)