About this item
The living world runs on genomic software - what Dawn Field and Neil Davies call the biocode - the sum of all DNA on Earth. In Biocode, they tell the story of a new age of scientific discovery the growing global effort to read and map the biocode, and what that might mean for the future. The structure of DNA was identified in 1953, and the whole human genome was mapped by 2003. Since then the new field of genomics has mushroomed and is now operating on an industrial scale. Genomes can now be sequenced rapidly and increasingly cheaply. The genomes of large numbers of organisms from mammals to microbes, have been mapped. Getting your genome sequenced is becoming affordable for many. You too can check paternity, find out where your ancestors came from, or whether you are at risk of some diseases.
About the Author
Dawn Field, PhD, is the author of Biocode: The New Age of Genomics. She is a Senior Research Fellow at the NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, a Research Associate of the Biodiversity Institute of Oxford at Oxford University and a Research Associate of the Smithsonian Institution. She is a founder of the Genomic Standards Consortium, the Genomic Observatories Network, Ocean Sampling Day and the Moorea Avatar (IDEA) project.
