Chance in the House of Fate: A Natural History of Heredity (2001) 5/1/06. Reviewed by Jon Turney Jennifer Ackerman's stylish guide to the unity and diversity of genes across all of life.

"I will always love an earthworm far better than an exon", writes Jennifer Ackerman. Yet for all her devotion to an older style of natural history, she has a fine eye for the intricacies of the cells and genes that underpin the whole organism. Her stylish book is a meditation on a host of the genetic discoveries of the last decades. But it is also a reflection on the things that really interest us about genes and their ways - on similarity and difference, on sex, development, ageing and death.

Stylish? Yes, this is a science book that can be enjoyed for the writing as well as the ideas. Like earlier notable stylists with a biological bent, such as Loren Eiseley or Lewis Thomas, Ackerman has an arresting turn of phrase, a great sense of the example that will make an idea stay in the memory, and a knack for using the very personal to illustrate the universal. Many read science books more for the ideas than the style, and one with as developed a style as this is not to everyone's taste. But if you do appreciate the writing, she is an excellent companion on a personal journey through the tangled web of genes and gene action as it stands partially revealed by molecular analysis.

Her deepest fascination is with relationships, between individual humans in families, between humans in general, and between species. There is startling news on all these fronts, although the deep kinship with other organisms denoted by our joint ownership of crucial genes is perhaps the most startling. The fact that the same DNA sequences govern development in flies, mice and men is remarkable testimony to the unity of life.

But this is only one of a host of subjects Ackerman touches on in her tour. Other stops include the immune system, biorhythms, natural medicines, bacterial symbiosis, and the senses of smell and sight. On all these subjects, she switches adroitly between facts gleaned from the journals, glimpses of the scientists who did the work, vignettes from the natural world and personal episodes whose aptness redeems their occasional cloying quality.

There is hard science here, but also a rousing celebration of the unity of life at the molecular level. Ackerman successfully conveys that understanding some aspects of the basis of life reduces neither the mystery nor the wonder of the whole shebang, and that, as she puts it, "the cosmos of molecules and cells has surprising beauties and minute dramas every bit as beguiling as those of a bushmaster or a Bengal tiger".

Book details

Hardcover 288 pages (November 2001)
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Language: English
ISBN: 0747556822