The bad news is that this book is written by a journalist, with all the pathologies that implies, including far far too many exact quotes, and an obsession with who, when, where rather than what and why.
The good news is that the subject material is intrinsically interesting, and the book does not waste much time telling us what we already know, the standard Darwin, Mendel, Watson and Crick stuff.

One interesting thing that came out of it is that Craig Venter doesn't seem to be nearly as bad a guy as the impression I'd received of him; it really does seem that at every stage of the game his goal was to get to the data, and to make it public, not to monopolize it and make himself rich, and that when Celera started to renege a little on making the data public he left.

Unlike previous books I've read, this one does at least start to touch on the issue of personal genomes, ie how individuals differ. However I was disappointed by the discussion which seemed to imply that single nucleotide changes are all that matters. I have to wonder if this is really what most scientists think, or if this is simply the same sort of dumbed-down doctrine that gave us the central dogma and junk DNA, a sort of pathological inability to accept that what we don't know might actually be not just important, but perhaps even more significant than what we do know.

In summary I'd have to say "wow". This book covered a vast amount of material and showed me just how much has happened in biology in the last five years or so. Now I need to read another ten or so more books to consolidate the information. ( )