Jacob's Ladder by Henery Gee

Jacob's Ladder: The History of the Human Genome

Gee takes us from Aristotle right to the edge of current research into the Genome in a very readable style.  It is interesting that in some ways his project echoes that of the Revd Kendall which I was reading in parallel with this book, as both organise vast periods of history into a fundamentally coherent story.  As well as the science there is great interest in the way in which theories competed for acceptance, and how despite Darwin's celebrated status his ideas did not come out of nowhere and were not really there widely accepted at the time, and it was only with the much later establishment of genetics as the mode of variation that his ideas of natural selection were about to win the day. 

For me it was the first part of the book with its historical focus that was most interesting, the second part that explained the current theories of genetic was informative but not so engaging.  It was interesting to learn about the importance of networks within the genome and how allows the relatively small (albeit c.35K) number of genes to determine the seemingly infinite variety of human existence.

Gee concludes the book looking to the future and the possibilities of human manipulation of our own genome - he paints a stark picture in which we are meddling in something we do not fully understand - in particular we are no where near understanding what it is that give human's their 'humanity' and so we run the risk of creating more perfect physical bodies but disrupting the network so that we create super human zombies who lack "the spark of humanity" as Gee puts it.

Finally on p250 out of 251 you get a reference to Jacob's Ladder - he has titled the book after it so you think it must be important - yet it is oblique in the vision God promises Jacob that his descendents will inherit the ground on which he sleeps - so Gee asks the question "But does this licence extend to becoming angels ourselves?" Yet this does not seem to fit with the biblical text at all - for a start God's promise is local, it is a promise of the land of Israel not a general one, and how does possession of the land imply mastery such that we can remake ourselves.  God seems always to set limits, for example after the Flood he extends Adam's permission to feed on plants to animals - yet he tell Noah "I will demand an accounting from every animal".  I realise that I am making a mountain out of a mole hill in terms of the content of the book but Gee did use Jacob's Ladder as the title implying somehow he thinks this point runs through the whole - and I would largely agree with the point it is just an odd choice of metaphor.