Researchers will be trying to figure out the role that each gene plays in our complex biochemistry. For budding student geneticists who want to get in on the action, I recommend starting with the University of Utah's Genetic Science Learning Center site. Seeing is believing. Robert Anderson is a freelance science writer living in Los Angeles. Neuroimaging of the thalamus reveals that it is smaller in schizophrenics.
Organisms are algorithms that are incarnated in DNA molecules and in proteins.
So writes this French biologist, intent on looking at genes as synthesizers of proteins and on offering precise accounts of how they operate in such fundamental life processes as development, aging, learning, and behavior. Davies, the founding editor of Nature Genetics , gives a lively account of the costly and intensely competitive effort to decipher the full genetic composition of human beings. Doctor, geneticist, and lawyer Reilly examines the diverse uses of genetic technologies, from the proposal to diagnose a disorder in Lincoln's DNA known as Marfan syndrome to using animal organs in humans. This collection of essays originally appeared in Genetics . Written by such contributors to the field as Joshua Lederberg, Richard C. Lewontin, and John Tyler Bonner, they richly document the history of modern genetics research and its continuing evolution.