Andrew Brown

Instructions for Living

Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life

By

Little, Brown 224pp £20 order from our bookshop

Craig Venter is one of the most controversial figures in modern science. The British team who were part of the public effort to sequence the human genome spit nails at the mention of his name – he led the private consortium that was adjudged, partly for political reasons, to have reached its goals at the same time as the public team did, though his method relied on data that others had made freely available. Yet there is no faulting his ambition or capacity for hard work. Life at the Speed of Light is an account of the attempt to engineer life from first principles after the scientific triumphs of the second half of the 20th century led to the discovery of how these first principles are encoded in DNA.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • Start your week with a dose of Russian Revolutionary zeal. Donald Rayfield reviews Tobie Mathew's 'Greetings From t… ,
    • A treat from the LR Archive: exactly 20 years ago, Malcolm Bradbury reviewed John Updike's 'Bech at Bay' ,
    • ‘When bullets come close, the noise they make as they go past changes from a zing to a crack’ John Lanchester's dy… ,
    • Man with a Bloody Paintbrush: Robin Simon on Lucian Freud ,
    • Jane Ridley reviews The Diaries of Kenneth Rose (ed. D R Thorpe) ,
    • ‘Look,’ says Trump. ‘The fact is I’m only human.’ On the evidence of this book that point is debatable. From the A… ,
    • From our December/January issue - here's John Banville's review of Colm Tóibín on the fathers of Wilde, Yeats and J… ,
    Follow Us