The New Biology

 

Download New Biology – The Cell

When the first edition of this set was being written, the new biology was just beginning to come into its potential and to experience some of its first failures. Dolly the sheep was alive and well and had just celebrated her fifth birthday. Stem cell researchers, working 12-hour days, were giddy with the prospect of curing every disease known to humankind, but were frustrated by inconsistent results and the limited availability of human embryonic stem cells. Gene therapists, still reeling from the disastrous Gelsinger trial of 1998, were busy trying to figure out what had gone wrong and how to improve the safety of a procedure that many believed would revolutionize medical science. And cancer researchers, while experiencing many successes, hit their own speed bump when a major survey showed only modest improvements in the prognosis for all of the deadliest cancers.

During the 1970s, when the new biology was born, recombinant technology served to reenergize the sagging discipline that biology had become. This same level of excitement reappeared in the 1990s with the emergence of gene therapy, the cloning of Dolly the sheep, and the successful cultivation of stem cells. Recently, great excitement has come with the completion of the human genome project and the genome sequencing of more than 100 animal and plant species. Careful analysis of these genomes has spawned a new branch of biological research known as comparative genomics. The information that scientists can now extract from animal genomes is expected to improve all other branches of biological science. Not to be outdone, stem cell researchers have found a way to produce embryo- like stem cells from ordinary skin cells. This achievement not only marks the end of the great stem cell debate, but it also provides an immensely powerful procedure, known as cellular dedifferentiation, for studying and manipulating the very essence of a cell. This procedure will become a crucial weapon in the fight against cancer and many other diseases.

The new biology, like our expanding universe, has been growing and spreading at an astonishing rate. The amount of information that is now available on these topics is of astronomical proportions. Thus, the problem of deciding what to leave out has become as difficult as the decision of what to include. The guiding principle in
writing this set has always been to provide a thorough overview of the topics without overwhelming the reader with a mountain of facts and figures. To be sure, this set contains many facts and figures, but these have been carefully chosen to illustrate only the essential principles.