The Common Thread

So I gave up on Wicked for a while.  As the folks at Pop Culture Happy Hour would say, I am not a "bitter ender."  If I lose interest in something, I just put it down.  Half the books on this list have been picked up by me and read partially at some point.  Then I just lose interest or something new and shiny comes along and I forget about the book I was reading.  So... Wicked got lost in the shuffle of things.  I got half way through, and it wasn't my favorite thing, but it was interesting.  So I do intend to finish it.  Sometime.
Anyway, what I picked up in the mean time was The Common Thread, a book about the sequencing of the human genome way back in the day when that shit took forever and cost a lot of money.  For perspective, when John Sulston et al were working on sequencing the first human genome, it cost millions and millions of dollars and took multiple sequencing centers with hundreds of sequencing machines several years to do it.  One part of my thesis project is an experiment involving the sequencing of 18 different mouse exomes (a fragment of the genome that includes only genes, not the rest of the "junk" and regulatory stuff).  And that will take maybe a month.  A decade of engineering has reduced the cost and time such that something that took multiple nations and several universities several years, now takes the Wash U sequencing core a few weeks... and most of that is just data analysis.  CRAZY!
Ok, anyway, on to the book.  I do love me some science writing, and I particularly enjoy it when the scientist doing the writing seems like someone I would actually want to meet.  Such is the case with Dr. John Sulston. The book is written wholly from his perspective, and he comes across as the genial bearded Englishman that he is.  Oh and of course he's brilliant to boot, though he doesn't write with much ego at all, unlike other Nobel Laureate authors (cough Dr. James Watson cough)
The book could be somewhat dry and there were parts that even I, nearing the end of my Genetics PhD training, found hard to understand.  I can't imagine how a lay reader could slog through some of the information on cloning and YACs and BACs, etc.
The most interesting part of the book, for me, was the personal story of Dr. Sulston's career.  Maybe it's just because I'm a scientist and I want to know how you can remain in such a cutthroat field without being a bit... well... difficult.  I also enjoyed his perspectives on the comparison between British and American scientific practice and how the politics of working with the NIH from overseas worked.
Of course, the main draw of this book was the conflict between Dr. Sulston (and the whole publicly-funded sequencing effort) and Dr. J. Craig Venter, who led a corporate sequencing initiative with the goal of patenting gene sequences for profit.  Dr. Sulston very clearly does not like Dr. Venter, and the portrayal of their conflict could get a little caustic and overly-specific.  But, since Dr. Sulston was expressing my view of things anyway, I didn't mind it too much.
Patenting the human genome is wrong.  Publicly funding medical research is essential.  Free enterprise and the free market is all well and good, but the ethics of the marketplace have still not caught up with the realities of technology and medicine. Until they do, I will not trust my genetic information to some company that wants to use it to benefit shareholders at my expense.  Also, I've heard Dr. Venter speak at conferences twice.  He doesn't do much to dispel the image of him as a megalomaniac thrill seeker trying to get the most money out of modern science, whether that image is fair or not.
Anyway, I would give this book 8 out of 10 for me, but probably 4 out of 10 for the average reader.  I wouldn't recommend it to a friend outside of the biomedical research community, but I'd happily give it as a holiday gift to all my fellow bio-nerd friends.