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H E R D I N G H E M I N G WAY ’ S C AT S
In search of answers, I travelled and Skyped my way around the world talking to a range of researchers working at the frontiers of genetics, past and present. There wasn’t any particularly clever selection process behind my hit list. In some cases they were people I already knew from my previous incarnation as a research scientist. Others were recommended to me, or just seemed like interesting people to go see based on the ideas and work they had published. Not all of their stories are told here, but every single person I spoke to shaped my thinking in some way. I’m grateful to them all for their time, intellectual generosity and coffee. Lots of coffee. As well as asking everyone about their research, I always ended each interview with the same question: What do you think is weird? The history of science tells us that today’s inexplicable oddities are tomorrow’s revolutionary breakthroughs, and I wanted to look down the road we’re heading along, as well as mapping out our current understanding. When I started working on this book I thought I was pretty clued up. After all, I’d spent years studying genetics and working in research labs dedicated to figuring out what’s going on as our genes are read and interpreted. But as I started talking, reading and thinking about it all, my preconceptions skittered away from me like wilful kittens. It turns out that there’s a lot less certainty – and a lot more myth and dogma – around our genes than many people might realise. This is my attempt to herd all these ideas together. It’s not a hardcore genetics textbook, by any means. Instead, it’s a book full of stories about you, your genes, cats with thumbs, fish with hips, and some of the wonderful ways in which your genome comes to life to make you who you are. I hope you enjoy it.
A couple of things to note: I use the words ‘read’ and ‘reading’ in two different contexts throughout. One is the act of scientists reading the order of letters (bases) in DNA – a technique known as DNA sequencing. The other refers to the machinery inside a cell reading a
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