El Genoma

What has made the Human Genome Project so deeply appealing? In one sense, it’s just another large-scale, big-budget effort to keep a gang of nerds busy and out of trouble for a few years. Geneticist Gary Zweiger looks askance at this and explains how the confluence of information systems, big science, and business exemplified by the HGP is actually accelerating the pace of beneficial change for all people. Transducing the Information, Anarchy, and Revolution in the Biomedical Sciences draws deeply on Zweiger’s experience in biological science and biotech commerce to illuminate the scientific, economic, and legal issues relevant to the search for a more complete understanding of human genetics. Brimming with pro-capitalist optimism, he believes that the information revolution spawned the biotech explosion and will soon lead to better, cheaper solutions to a very broad range of health Knowledge of our internal information network will come mostly from an explosion of new genomic database analyses. A growing army of mathematicians and information scientists will develop increasingly powerful and more useful algorithms and computational processes for finding biomedical knowledge in these databases. A growing regiment of biologists and medical professionals with training in mathematics and information sciences will lead these knowledge discovery missions. Zweiger assuages the reader’s fears of gene patents with a brief foray into intellectual property law. It does seem unlikely that biotech patents will pose any more problems than standard pharmaceutical company practice. Combining scientific, legal, and business expertise, Transducing the Genome provides the most comprehensive overview of the birth of biotech yet written. –Rob Lightner