Drawing the Map of Life inside the Human Genome Project (review)

The history of recent science is the second draft of history. That gives we who write it a special relationship to science reporters. We don’t have the luxury of dismissing them as unserious; often, their narratives are what those of us who work the leading edge of history must reinforce, revise, or refute. Since the 1970s Victor McElheny has chronicled the maturation of molecular biology from the thrilling vanguard of laboratory science into an economic powerhouse and the core discipline of biomedicine. His 2003 life of James Watson is the first biography of the celebrated co-solver of the structure of DNA. In his latest book McElheny draws on firsthand experience, news reports and press releases, interviews, the scientific literature, and some scholarly books in recounting the origins of the Human Genome Project and bringing its story up-to-date. He chooses to emphasize the genome as technology, an approach that, without some sophistication, easily leads to a triumphalist narrative—a seduction that McElheny makes no visible effort to resist.

He begins, appropriately enough, in the 1970s, with the development of restriction enzymes, recombinant DNA, model organisms, and, of course, DNA sequencing. But then, inexplicably, he leaps to the 1993 identification of the Huntington’s disease gene—sometimes called the “crown jewel” of gene-hunting—before backtracking to deliver a quick briefing on the development of the biotechnology industry. With such balletic celebration McElheny flies past some critical techniques, such as human–mouse cell hybridization, invented by Mary Weiss and Howard Green and developed by Frank Ruddle and others, into the first effective means of mapping auto-somal human genes. Somatic cell genetics is not part of the canonical genome narrative. In fact, the entire narrative of clinical gene-mapping and the Human Genome Organization, so crucial to shaping the early genome project, is barely mentioned in this or other genome histories. McElheny is more interested in hitting the highlights than in conveying the richness of the history as it appeared while it was unfolding.

The significant debate over whether to undertake a “big science” genome project is gathered under the rubric of “getting started.” If this book represents the historiographical trend, the disciplinary soul-searching of the late 1980s, so trenchantly covered by Robert Cook-Deegan in 1994 in The Gene Wars, is coming to be crammed into the prehistory of the genome. Perhaps it is becoming difficult, given the transformative effect of genomics on biology, to see that early dissent as much more than shortsightedness.

Here, the project’s “crisis,” rather, comes in the late 1990s when Craig Venter turned the project on its head. Short-circuiting previous debates over which parts of the genome to sequence first and who had the most expertise on which chromosome, Venter formed a private company and proposed to sequence the entire genome in one go. Or rather, a series of goes, cross-checked against one another to provide redundancy and therefore increased confidence. His approach telescoped the genome project from a ten-year slog into a mad three-year dash to a first draft of the genome in 2000.

The second half of the book covers the fast-moving period since the turn of the century. This is the best part, since here the historiographical trail fades and one can easily feel lost in the jungle. Helpfully, McElheny roughs out many important moments of this dynamic, transitional period: the drastic downsizing of our estimates of the number of human genes; the surprising discovery of new and potent, though short-lived, forms of RNA; and the realization that the genome was far from a static “blueprint” or “parts manual.” It now seems a richly dynamic system, constantly rearranging itself and responding to the environment. The genome truly is, as Barbara McClintock said in 1980, a “sensitive organ of the cell.”

This draft of history is quite rough, however. In the last, most valuable third, the narrative largely dissolves and the book becomes...