About this item
News stories report almost daily on the remarkable progress scientists are making in unraveling the genetic basis of disease and behavior. Meanwhile, new technologies are rapidly reducing the cost of reading someone's personal DNA (all six billion letters of it). Within the next ten years, hospitals may present parents with their newborn's complete DNA code along with her footprints and APGAR score. In Genetic Twists of Fate, distinguished geneticists Stanley Fields and Mark Johnston help us make sense of the genetic revolution that is upon us. Fields and Johnston tell real life stories that hinge on the inheritance of one tiny change rather than another in an individual's DNA: a mother wrongly accused of poisoning her young son when the true killer was a genetic disorder; the screen siren who could no longer remember her lines because of Alzheimer's disease; and the president who was treated with rat poison to prevent another heart attack.
About the Author
Stanley Fields is professor in the departments of Genome Sciences and Medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle, and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Mark Johnston is professor and chair of the department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and editor-in-chief of the journal Genetics. The photo shows Fields (left) and Johnston (right) in Cambridge, England, in front of the Eagle Pub, where lunchtime discussions of James Watson and Francis Crick in the early 1950's played a part in their discovery of the double helical structure of DNA. Fields grew up in New York and received his undergraduate degree from Middlebury College in Vermont. He carried out graduate research at Cambridge University and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Johnston, a native of Wisconsin, graduated from its university in Madison before carrying out graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Utah. The two authors collaborated on several scientific papers before setting out to try to make genetics fathomable to all those whose tax dollars generously support medical research, including that done in their own labs.
