In the early days of organic chemistry many people thought that even the simplest substances of biological origin, such as alcohol and urea, would never be synthesised from their elements by man: a mystical entity called vital force would be required. A century later it was commonly held that different proteins did not have specific or peculiar molecular structures. When filterable viruses were first crystallised some workers contended that they were chemical substances, others a form of life. In 1963, when Sydney Brenner suggested that it would be possible to establish the structure of a small nematode and to relate it to its functions, as precisely as Max Perutz had been doing with the molecule of haemoglobin, few people understood sufficiently to agree.

Most Members of this Institute will have at least a little knowledge of the work on Caenorhabditis elegans for which Brenner, with Sir John Sulston and Robert Horvitz, shared the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine in 2002. In 1957 Brenner had been invited by Francis Crick to work in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. In 1998 the worm became the first multi-cellular organism to have its genome sequenced. The human genome project grew directly from the work that had been done on worms. Without it human DNA would undoubtedly have been sequenced but more slowly and perhaps less thoroughly. Many Members of this Institute will be grateful to Andrew Brown for his account of the research.

However its readership should extend more widely than that. Many school libraries should have a copy. Only the more intelligent part of the Upper Sixth will read it but they would be the better if they did, as would the staff. It is not a textbook. Much of it young students will not understand but the brighter ones will be inspired to seek the necessary basic biological and chemical information elsewhere. From the school staff room the science side should regard it as good bedtime reading and the arts people would understand their colleagues better if they did the same. Young graduate students wondering whether research is for them may be helped towards an answer. Those journalists and others who are not biologists yet write or speak tendentiously about the human genome project might pause for a moment to read; and reflect.

Andrew Brown writes about the biology, the chemistry and the computer software with authority. However most of the book is about the people and, especially, about the research. The potential research worker who is intimidated by the intellect of a Brenner or a Sulston should read the account of the work of Eileen Southgate. She was the technician who worked for John White and Nichol Thomson on the nerves. Thomson embedded the worms, less than one millimetre long, in blocks of araldite and cut these in a microtome into slices one twentieth of a micron thick. Southgate took the slices in sequence, several thousand for each worm, and photographed them with an electron microscope. She examined the photographs in sequence, tracing the path of each of the many nerves. She prepared really beautiful schematic drawings. Repetitive, tedious, boring, monotonous; conscientious, scrupulous, reliable, patient. It is easy to write adjectives. The work took twenty years.

Britain still suffers from the dichotomy between the Two Cultures. British science needs some support. That indefinable character the General Reader, perhaps especially if young, would benefit if he read Brown’s book.

A postscript. There is a lot of sex in the book. It is not quite the sex that usually preoccupies the teenager. The vulva that is so lovingly and intimately scrutinised is that of a very little hermaphrodite. But a lot of the book is fun.

Ronald McAllister