Life at the Speed of Light

摘要

The biologist J. Craig Venter is most praised for his success in mapping and sequencing genomes, including his own. But he is quite different from most contemporary scien-tists, who are usually chained to the "impact" of their own work and the "ranking" of journals in which they publish, often in a mass-production manner. Venter does not stop at merely sequencing his own genome and publishing it, he has also broadcast it into space in the form of electromagnetic waves. As he is not sure whether there is "... any creature out there capable of making sense of the instructions in my genome",M he provides us ordinary mortals on Earth with his new book Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life.