The Impact of the Gene - From Mendel's Peas to Designer Babies (Hardcover, 1st American ed)

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How genetics, and the technologies that arise from it, will affect the way we live in the twenty-first century.

Every day a new development in genetics seems to make headline news: genetically engineered crops, cloned sheep, the Human Genome Project. Some scientists and entrepreneurs are even contemplating cloned and genetically engineered human beings -- "designer babies." And while advocates of evolutionary psychology suggest that their findings provide essential insight into "human nature," opponents level charges of "genetic determinism." Much of the world's politics is rooted in primitive notions of heredity -- of tribe and race. Confusion reigns, even among acknowledged "experts" and political leaders.

The Impact of the Gene traces how the ideas that underpin the spectrum of controversies are interrelated and flow naturally from the insights of a mid-nineteenth-century Moravian friar, Gregor Mel, who first established the principles of modern genetics with his deceptively simple experiments on peas in the monastery garden at Brno. Acclaimed science writer Colin Tudge shows that if we can understand what Mel did and why, then all modern genetics fall easily into place. Tudge also addresses the ethical implications of the modern genetic technologies, seeking to define the criteria by which to judge good and bad, and showing why we must find ways to contain our new and awesome power.