BOOKSHELF

Natural History, June, 2001

Brave New Brain: Conquering Mental Illness in the Era of the Genome, by Nancy C. Andreasen (Oxford University Press, 2001; $29.95)

Neuroimaging of the thalamus reveals that it is smaller in schizophrenics. According to Andreasen, a neuroscientist, future mapping of the organ holds the promise of finding in "this small haystack ... the quixotic needle that can be used to slay one of the biggest giants of mental illness."

The Misunderstood Gene, by Michel Morange (Harvard University Press, 2001; $24.95)

"Organisms are algorithms that are incarnated in DNA molecules and in proteins." So writes this French biologist, intent on looking at genes as synthesizers of proteins and on offering precise accounts of how they operate in such fundamental life processes as development, aging, learning, and behavior.

The Impact of the Gene: From Mendel's Peas to Designer Babies, by Colin Tudge (Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001; $27)

For Tudge, a scientist turned writer, the immense possibilities of biotechnology raise the disturbing question, Is our basic humanity at risk?

Transducing the Genome: Information, Anarchy, and Revolution in the Biomedical Sciences, by Gary Zweiger (McGraw Hill, 2001; $24.95)

Storing and analyzing the genomic data of our species, writes Zweiger, promises to create "a dramatically new understanding of life" but also to impose on us the enormous responsibility of becoming "stewards of our own genome."

Cracking the Genome: Inside the Race to Unlock Human DNA, by Kevin Davies (The Free Press, 2001; $25)

Davies, the founding editor of Nature Genetics, gives a lively account of the costly and intensely competitive effort to decipher the full genetic composition of human beings. The Human Genome Project, begun in 1990 and completed this year, "represents an extraordinary technological achievement, and is at best perhaps the defining moment in the evolution of mankind."

Abraham Lincoln's DNA and Other Adventures in Genetics, by Philip R. Reilly (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2000; $25)

Doctor, geneticist, and lawyer Reilly examines the diverse uses of genetic technologies, from the proposal to diagnose a disorder in Lincoln's DNA known as Marfan syndrome to using animal organs in humans.

Perspectives on Genetics: Anecdotal, Historical, and Critical Commentaries, 1987-1998, edited by James F. Crow and William E Dove (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000; $19.95)

This collection of essays originally appeared in Genetics. Written by such contributors to the field as Joshua Lederberg, Richard C. Lewontin, and John Tyler Bonnet, they richly document the history of modern genetics research and its continuing evolution.

Decoding Darkness: The Search for the Genetic Causes of Alzheimer's Disease, by Rudolph E. Tanzi and Ann B. Parson (Perseus Publishing, 2000; $26)

Isolating the genes and proteins responsible for this neuron-wasting disorder (now affecting 20 percent of people age seventy-five to eighty-four and 40 percent of those eighty-five and over) has been Tanzi's ripest since the early 1980s.

The Seven Daughters of Eve: The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry, by Bryan Sykes (W W. Norton, 2001; $25.95)

Modern genetics permits us to journey into the deep past of our species, "way beyond the reach of written records or stone inscriptions," writes geneticist Sykes. "These genes tell a story which begins over a hundred thousand years ago and whose latest chapters are hidden within the cells of every one of us."

The Way of the Cell: Molecules, Organisms, and the Order of Life, by Franklin M. Harold (Oxford University Press, 2001; $27.50)

In 1944 physicist Erwin Schrodinger published his book What Is Life? This ageless question is at the heart of Harold's investigation of the ubiquitous "process of living" and the unique capacity of organisms "to reproduce themselves indefinitely, and arise on a millennial time-scale by the interplay of variation and selection that underlies biological evolution."

The books mentioned are usually available in the Museum Shop or via the Museum's Web site, www.amnh.org.