CRACKING THE GENOME
Inside the Race to Unlock Human DNA
By Kevin Davies
Free Press, 288 pages, $25

The Washington Post Book World

By Robin Marantz Henig

All the year-end lists agree that the biggest scientific event of 2000 was the sequencing of the human genome.  When President Clinton announced last June that scientists had succeeded in “learning the language in which God created life,” the discovery was hailed as the most significant achievement since the Apollo moon landing - or, in more lyrical accounts, a Bach sonata, a Shakespearean sonnet, or the invention of the wheel.

But despite the high-minded language that characterized the White House press conference, the two scientists who stood up with the president that morning had spent the previous few years embroiled in a public feud based not only on a hearty dislike for one another, but on an honest disagreement about the best way to uncover the chemical libretto for all the DNA in every human being.  The “race” that ensued between these men and the two perspectives they represented - Francis Collins of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda on the government side, Craig Venter of Celera Genomics in Rockville on the side of the entrepreneur - almost overshadowed the science itself.   But it sure made for some good reading.

Now it’s time to get behind the headlines about races and feuds.  As with so many subjects, the quick version in newspaper stories will include at least a few inevitable mistakes, caused by deadline pressures and reporters’ tendency to depend on their favorite sources.  And so it remains for book authors - journalists with the luxury of time - to offer readers a more measured, and hopefully more accurate, account.  This is especially important when the subject is human genes, because our ability to understand and manipulate them can change our very definition of who we are.

This context-setting is the best part of “Cracking the Code.” Kevin Davies, a Ph.D. geneticist and founding editor of Nature Genetics, gives a clear summary of the first 150 years of genetics, and of how our emerging understanding of the human genome will affect such disparate fields as evolutionary biology, cancer prevention, gene therapy, and anthropology.  He also shows how the animosity between Collins and Venter boils down to a scientific disagreement about how genome sequencing should be done, and a cultural disagreement about how the information should be dispersed.  Thus the juicy quote from Venter, who calls the NIH approach “putting humanity in a Waring blender and coming up with a patchwork quilt”; and the juicier quote from Collins, who derides Celera’s speedy output as the “Cliffs Notes version of the genome.”

But Davies has higher aspirations than mere explication; he wants to generate a few fireworks of his own.  He says his goal in writing this book - the first one out of the gate in what is certain to be a slew of books on this hot, sexy topic - is “to capture the excitement, intrigue, mystery, and majesty of the quest for biology’s holy grail.”  In this, he is much less successful.

In his drive to get his book out before the others, Davies has apparently chosen a shortcut: rewriting what has already been written, rather than spending time observing and interviewing the scientists themselves.  He is, sad to say, not the first journalist to do so.  Interviews require a lot of wasted and redundant effort: travel to places you’ve already been, questions whose answers you already know.  Far more efficient, when you’re facing down a six-month book deadline, to collect masses of information from the pages of The New York Times, Science, Nature, Discover, and a few popular books, and to use quotes from them as though they were perfectly true.

But by restating these accounts as gospel - even with his careful footnotes, 46 pages’ worth, giving citations for every single fact, quote, and opinion - Davies is doing little more than repeating the easy stereotypes and shallow explanations.  Journalism has been called the first rough draft of history, and it does not serve history well to take those first drafts and enshrine them between hard covers.

In addition, the sense of excitement is dissipated in a book that gets its heart and soul from papers instead of people.  Davies did interview a few scientists, according to his footnotes - a total of ten by my count, mostly last June and July - but they were only those on the periphery, not the major players with the most to win and lose. Perhaps the major players denied him interviews, hoping to tell the real inside story in books of their own.  But whatever the explanation, the result is a well-written but strangely bloodless book about a lively and passionate scientific romp, with little of the sense of immediacy that such a narrative demands.