Book description
John Sulston was director of the Sanger Centre in Cambridge from 1993
to 2000. There he led the British arm of the international team
selected to map the entire human DNA sequence, a feat that was pulled
off in record time by an extraordinary collaboration of scientists.
Despite innumerable setbacks and challenges from outside competitors
the ultimate success of the project can be attributed in large part to
John Sulston's own determination, passion and scientific excellence.
In this personal account he takes us behind the scenes of one of the
largest international scientific operations ever undertaken. He is
frank about the competition with Craig Venter and Celera Genomics,
which threatened to undermine the international community's attempts
to make the sequence freely available to everyone. He shares with us
his excitement as the project unfolded. And as a pragmatist he reveals
his hopes and concerns as to how the information unlocked by the Human
Genome Project will affect people's lives in the future.
The Common Thread is at once a compelling history of this most
exciting of scientific breakthroughs and also an impassioned call for
ethical responsibility in scientific research. As the boundaries
between science and big business increasingly blur, and researchers
race to patent medical discoveries, the international community needs
to find a common protocol for the protection of the wider human
interest. The Common Thread tells a story of our shared human
heritage, offering hope for future research and a fresh outlook on our
scientific understanding of ourselves.
John Sulston was the director of the Sanger Centre in
Cambridge, where he led the British team in their work on the Human
Genome Project, for seven years (1993-2000). He is a Fellow of the
Royal Society and was knighted in the 2001 New Year's Honours List for
his contribution to science.
Georgina Ferry is a science writer and broadcaster and the
author of Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life which was short-listed for both the
Duff Cooper Prize and the March Biography Award.
