Gene Machine Book

Overview

I picked up a non fiction book and finally pushed through to completion and it turned out to be a really worthwhile read.

Overall my feel about the book was that it was not too technical and focused more on the human aspect of science. How scientists interacted with each other, how they kept up with people, socialized and went on about answering unanswered questions in the universe. Kind of like a sneak peek onto the Science world. The first half gives an intro of the author, how he switched to Biology from Physics and who his early mentors and friends were.

As the middle of the book approaches, he describes about the idea of crystallizing the ribosome to use synchrotrons to identify the structure of the parts of the ribosome. There are four groups stuck in a race to find out who gets the best resolution and figures out the structure of the ribosome. At about 70% of the book, the author’s ( Venki Ramakrishnan ) team and a team from Yale simultaneously solve the structure of the ribosome. Yale team solving the 50S structure and Venki’s group solving the 30S part. But the interesting part is, the rest of the 30% of the book covers the politics involved in getting a medal and how getting the medal can derail a person’s scientific career.

He goes in depth about each and every person he encountered in the journey to explain their personality and identify their strengths and weaknesses.

My thoughts

My favourite part of the book is when the group braces themselves and starts work on the project while on the moving to Europe, not knowing even if their research would lead to something.

A few takeaways for me from this book were: ribosomes perform a lot of steps to synthesize proteins : The ribosome started out as some sort of RNA backbone that acts as both a structural part as well as taking care of coding information The scientific field is full of competition and full of smart people This becomes very clear in the way people act towards each other and try to one up the other people. The author does not hesitate to criticize or point out when someone is wrong. Usually this leads to Better outcomes for everyone involved but with sometimes you being the bad guy. It prevents problems that can happen in the future because of current disagreements. Getting a prize and solving Scientific problems is not just about being smart it’s about knowledge, knowing others and a good chunk of luck involved. But the only thing that anyone can do is keep putting in the effort and going forward.

Overall I think it is a very very nice book and anyone who is at a crossroads of careers thinking of pursuing studies or switching jobs, should definitely give this book a read. It shows how slowly some aspects of science progress and explains “good things take time”.