Ridley is a well-respected journalist with The Economist, and knows how to write authoritatively on issues of popular science. For all the possible dangers of genetic determinism, in this remarkable book, Ridley demonstrates that social determinism is worse.I knew I would not be disappointed with Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters as I had read Ridley’s previous book The Red Queen, about the biological origins of sexual reproduction with great delight.

Modern genetic research represents humanity's ‘cutting edge’ and is therefore inevitably political, despite what its practitioners might wish. Ridley is no mad anarchist, but a thoughtful libertarian who demonstrates that throughout history the balance between the powers of the state and those of the individual has been tipped too often, even within democracies, in favour of those with the big guns.

The heroes are voluntary organizations like the Wellcome Trust or the Committee for the Prevention of Jewish Genetic Disease, which has done much to eliminate Tay-Sachs disease and cystic fibrosis among Jews by premarital screening. With a keen eye on the doctrine that knowledge is power, Ridley casts the enemies in Genome as those who would use the state to restrict individuals' access to their own genetic information and those who would exploit the state to control gene research or therapy. In today's corporate world of huge government-funded grants and labs, many would like to forget that in Hitler-era Germany, more than half of all academic biologists joined the Nazi Party-a higher proportion than that of any other professional group-largely because of that party's support for genetics. The modern science of genetics may seem benign, but we often forget that it emerged out of a shameful past-eugenics-under the auspices of which over 100,000 individuals were compulsorily sterilized by the United States government, and in the service of which laboratories such as Cold Spring Harbor were created. But Genome also carries a deeper social message, which may explain why Ridley has critics he is a libertarian in a genome community that contains many statists. I gave a copy to an old classmate of mine, now an orthopaedic surgeon, and he loves it. This is the book to give to an intelligent person who knows something about life science, even if that knowledge is outdated or rudimentary, and who would enjoy accessing modern molecular biology without struggling through northern blots or X-ray diffractions. James Watson described this book as “a lucid and exhilarating romp through our human chromosomes,” and he is right.

Genome by matt ridley