Gene therapy, the human genome project, the creation of new varieties of animals and plants have all emanated from molecular biology. Beginning with turn-of-the-century experimentations, this ambitious history covers the story of the transformation of biology over the last 100 years. This text is a complete but compact account for a general readership of the history of the revolution within molecular biology. The author takes us from the beginning of the 20th century convergence of molecular biology's two progenitors, genetics and biochemistry, to the perfection of gene slicing and cloning techniques in the 1980s. Drawing on the work of American, English, and French historians of science, Michel Morange describes the major discoveries - the double helix, messenger RNA, oncogenes, DNA polymerase - but also explains how and why these breakthroughs took place. The text contains mini-biographies of the founders of molecular biology: Delbruck, Watson and Crick, Monod and Jacob and Nirenberg.
