| THE BOOK OF MAN The Human Genome Project and the Quest to Discover Our Genetic Heritage Walter Bodmer Robin McKie New York: Oxford University Press, 1994 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN 0-19-511487-6 | 259pp. | SC/BWI | $13.95 | |
| Page 22: | "(This process is called meiosis, and it contrasts with mitosis, the normal form of division which we encountered on page 20 in which two daughter cells, each bearing 46 chromosomes, are found from one parent cell.)" |
| Almost certainly S/B "are formed from one parent cell". |
| Page 47: | "Just one spelling error along the three thousand million DNA letters that make up a person's genome ('genome' is the name we give to cell's, or a person's total compliment of chromosomes) is enough to give rise to abnormal haemoglobin that can confer malarial resistance when combined with normal haemoglobin, but which gives rise to severe anaemia on its own." |
| S/B "total complement of chromosomes". |
| Page 50: | "In the last chapter we saw how Crick and Watson had shown that those adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T) bases were the building blocks of genes, and that triplets of them coded for specific amino acids." |
| This is somewhat nit-picky. It was Miescher and his colleagues (see page 34) who showed that DNA is made up of the four bases described. However, it is true that Crick and Watson deduced the essentials of how DNA operates, as well as how DNA is transcribed to RNA and how RNA codes for specific amino acids. |
| Page 55: | "...as well the Leader who was to be recreated from his nose (the only surviving organ after assassination) in Woody Allen's science fiction spoof Sleeper..." |
| S/B "as well as the Leader". |
| Page 58: | "...It was a fraught existence;..." |
| The way I learned it, this is a misuse of the adjective "fraught", which cannot stand alone in this way. So by that standard, the proper usage in this context would be something like "It was an existence fraught with pressure". However, modern dictionaries allow both usages. |
| Page 113: | "Some of these are trivial; some are not, as we can see from the case of Mary James who lost her second baby after having a perfectly normal first pregnancy. Weak from loss of blood, her surgeons arranged for a transfusion." |
| I hope they were sitting down when they arranged for that transfusion. I hope they arranged one for the patient as well. (This is a fairly common grammatical error known as the dangling participle.) |
| Page 116: | "A total of ten genes code for these HLA system types." |
| An error of number: S/B "total ... codes". (Yes, this is a nitpick.) |
| Page 122: | "X-ray crystallography studies have discovered that the HLA molecule acts like a clamp on a cell's surface, a biochemical vice that holds protein..." |
| Actually, the HLA molecule is clearly a biochemical virtue. But this error is simply a choice of the wrong homophone: S/B "vise". |
| Page 124: | "Another target is Aids ..." |
| This is the acronym for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome: S/B "AIDS". (This error appears in several places.) |
| Page 202: | The last paragraph on this page is printed in a smaller font size than the rest of the book. |
| A rather odd error; could it have been done to avoid expensive reprinting of multiple copies? |
| Page 210: | "The sequencing and cataloguing of all genes that lie along the 24 chromosomes (22 plus the X and the Y) ..." |
| Confusing change of terminology: the normal usage is that there are 23 pairs of chromosomes, with the X and Y counting as one pair. This is the way the book presents it in the diagram on page 23. |
| Page 227: | "However, to benefit from these discoveries, the act active commercial exploitation of discoveries will have to be established." |
| An unintentional repetition of the word fragment. |
| Page 227: | At the bottom of the page, three lines of text failed to print. Page 228 begins in the middle of a sentence. |
| Another printing goof. |
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