The Gene: A Grand Tour and Gentle Introduction
W 2020
Description
NOTE: This SDG was offered in W 2017 by Lee Molho.
Grand Tour is an apt metaphor to describe our core book and this SDG.
It is a story of discovery with many twists and turns, put together by our tour guide, the masterful Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee. We'll take in every major advance in the field from 1850 to 2016, we'll meet the scientists as they do their work, and we'll understand their motivation for what they are doing.
Our Grand Tour starts in Ancient Greece with the Pythagoreans and Aristotle. Very soon we are riding with Charles Darwin on the Beagle. We visit the garden of a Russian monk, Thomas Hunt Morgan's cages of buzzing fruit flies, and we attend the birth of the new science of genetics.
That's barely the beginning of the tour offered by our superlative new core book, which we will follow closely. This is top-drawer science writing--clear and understandable for a general audience, novelistic in pace and character detail, eruditely written, engaging, and informative.
If you have ever wanted to understand modern biology, not only some of the science but also its social and moral implications, the light that science shines on what race, sex, and gender really are, and where biotechnology is rushing to take us, you will enjoy this SDG.
Weekly Topics
The Gene, our core book, has 35 chapters. They have been grouped into the 14 weeks below not strictly by page count, but also based on how much material is covered and by how much there is to discuss in the chapters for the week. Each line in the list below corresponds to the contents of one chapter in The Gene. The majority of weekly readings are in the range of 28 to 38 pages.
1 Introduction to the author's family, a recurring thread throughout.
Heredity via philosophy: From Pythagoras and Aristotle to 1850.
Darwin and evolution: The best-adapted variants are selected naturally.
Darwin tries to define a theory of heredity but fails.
Mendel finds that inherited traits are passed as discrete alleles.
2 Rediscovered, Mendel's work becomes the basis of genetics.
Genetics is distorted into the false "science" of eugenics.
American eugenics in the 1920s gets into racial politics, prison, surgery.
Genes exist on chromosomes. Morgan and his fruit fly experiments.
3 Fisher and Dobzhansky show how genotypes lead to phenotypes.
Griffith: A gene is some kind of chemical. Muller: X-rays mutate fruit flies.
Nazis turn eugenics into the Holocaust. Lysenko's political genetics.
4 Avery purifies Griffith-experiment debris, is left with the chemical DNA.
Watson, Crick, Franklin, and Wilkins deduce DNA's structure.
How does DNA in a gene provide information to build a protein?
5 Pardee, Jacob, and Monod discover how genes are regulated.
How do genes control development of an organism from just one cell?
6 Berg, Boyer, and Cohen make bacterial hybrids and clone them.
Sanger sequences the complete genome of a virus (9 genes).
Scientists see biohazards and propose self-regulation at Asilomar.
7 Swanson and Boyer form Genentech, genetically engineer insulin.
"Was my father's fall the consequence of his genes?...new ways to think."
McKusick catalogs genetic diseases. Amniocentesis. Roe v. Wade.
8 Neo-eugenics. What is genetic wellness? How can causal genes be found?
Hemochromatosis. Genome signposts. Huntington's. Cystic fibrosis.
Genomic illness: cancer & schizophrenia; even crime? Polymerase chain reaction, fast sequencing.
9 Human Genome Project vs. Craig Venter: H.flu, C.elegans, fruit fly, human genome are sequenced.
Here's a summary of what the human genome sequence reveals.
10 Human ancestry, race, genes, and intelligence. "Normal" means what?
11 Sex, gender, and gender identity. XX, XY, SRY but 1000 shades of gray.
Is there a "gay gene"? Genes, twins, personality, and behavior. The role of chance.
12 Waddington. Gurdon's frogs. Epigenetic marks. Embryogenesis. RNA.
13 Embryonic stem cells. Gene therapy for OTC deficiency kills patient.
Predicting genetic risk: BRCA1, schizophrenia, bipolar disease. Moral hazards of preimplantation genetic diagnosis.
14 Gene therapy for Hemophilia. Inheritable therapy in germ line via embryonic stem cells & CRISPR/Cas9.
Future: Projects of discrimination, division, and eventual reconstruction.
1 Introduction to the author's family, a recurring thread throughout.
Heredity via philosophy: From Pythagoras and Aristotle to 1850.
Darwin and evolution: The best-adapted variants are selected naturally.
Darwin tries to define a theory of heredity but fails.
Mendel finds that inherited traits are passed as discrete alleles.
2 Rediscovered, Mendel's work becomes the basis of genetics.
Genetics is distorted into the false "science" of eugenics.
American eugenics in the 1920s gets into racial politics, prison, surgery.
Genes exist on chromosomes. Morgan and his fruit fly experiments.
3 Fisher and Dobzhansky show how genotypes lead to phenotypes.
Griffith: A gene is some kind of chemical. Muller: X-rays mutate fruit flies.
Nazis turn eugenics into the Holocaust. Lysenko's political genetics.
4 Avery purifies Griffith-experiment debris, is left with the chemical DNA.
Watson, Crick, Franklin, and Wilkins deduce DNA's structure.
How does DNA in a gene provide information to build a protein?
5 Pardee, Jacob, and Monod discover how genes are regulated.
How do genes control development of an organism from just one cell?
6 Berg, Boyer, and Cohen make bacterial hybrids and clone them.
Sanger sequences the complete genome of a virus (9 genes).
Scientists see biohazards and propose self-regulation at Asilomar.
7 Swanson and Boyer form Genentech, genetically engineer insulin.
"Was my father's fall the consequence of his genes?...new ways to think."
McKusick catalogs genetic diseases. Amniocentesis. Roe v. Wade.
8 Neo-eugenics. What is genetic wellness? How can causal genes be found?
Hemochromatosis. Genome signposts. Huntington's. Cystic fibrosis.
Genomic illness: cancer & schizophrenia; even crime? Polymerase chain reaction, fast sequencing.
9 Human Genome Project vs. Craig Venter: H.flu, C.elegans, fruit fly, human genome are sequenced.
Here's a summary of what the human genome sequence reveals.
10 Human ancestry, race, genes, and intelligence. "Normal" means what?
11 Sex, gender, and gender identity. XX, XY, SRY but 1000 shades of gray.
Is there a "gay gene"? Genes, twins, personality, and behavior. The role of chance.
12 Waddington. Gurdon's frogs. Epigenetic marks. Embryogenesis. RNA.
13 Embryonic stem cells. Gene therapy for OTC deficiency kills patient.
Predicting genetic risk: BRCA1, schizophrenia, bipolar disease. Moral hazards of preimplantation genetic diagnosis.
14 Gene therapy for Hemophilia. Inheritable therapy in germ line via embryonic stem cells & CRISPR/Cas9.
Future: Projects of discrimination, division, and eventual reconstruction.