PHOTO: DAVID M. PHILLIPS/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY


WHAT ARE WE LOOKING AT? Sperm surrounding egg, SEM


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TOP TACHEFacial hair could be the secret to securing a top job in medicine, according to a study by University of California San Francisco researchers. They found there are more senior doctors with moustaches (19 per cent) than there are senior female doctors (13 per cent).


TEETH TUMOUR Brain surgeons operating on a four-month-old boy diagnosed with a benign craniopharyngioma found a number of teeth growing inside it. The slow-growing tumour develops near the pituitary gland from nests of tooth-forming epithelium which contain deposits of calcium. Teratoma tumours have also been found to contain teeth. Source: medicaldaily.com


ANCIENT NOSE JOBThe first surgical rhinoplasty dates back to ancient Egypt and ancient India around 3000-2500BC. The Edwin Smith Papyrus, the oldest known surgical text, describes using a leaf to gauge the size of living cheek skin that would be dissected and attached to the nose.


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WHAT ARE WE LOOKING AT? Stumped? The answer is at the bottom of the page Pick: DVD – The Knick (season 1)


Created by Jack Amiel and Michael Begler. Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Starring Clive Owen, Andre Holland, Jeremy Bobb, Eve Hewson.


WITH so many medical dramas around, audiences can often feel there is nothing new to see. Not so with this thrillingly gory, beautifully-shot drama that delves into the world of the Knickerbocker Hospital in 1900 New York. Clive Owen (pictured), stands out as pioneering, arrogant chief surgeon John “Thack” Thackeray: an unpredictable genius struggling to control a cocaine addiction while


Book Review: The Gene: An Intimate History


By Siddhartha Mukherjee Bodley Head, £25 hardcover Review by Jim Killgore, associate editor


“IT has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.” This example of “supreme understatement” can be found in the 1953


Nature article by James Watson and Francis Crick detailing the molecular structure of DNA and it is just one towering milestone celebrated in Siddhartha Mukherjee’s artful new “intimate history” of the science of genetics. Mukherjee is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a stem cell biologist and cancer geneticist. He is also a talented science writer and his The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer won a Pulitzer Prize in 2011. This new book is “intimate” first in its focus on key personalities


involved in the epic discovery and elucidation of the gene, from the early observations of inborn “likeness” by Greek scholars to the meticulous work of the Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel demonstrating inheritance in pea plants, carried out at the same time as Darwin postulated his


pushing the boundaries of medical practice. There are few “routine” procedures at a time when so many basic life-saving innovations have not yet been invented. Social issues are skilfully observed, including the racism faced by talented black surgeon Algernon (Holland), the impact of illegal abortion, and the bleak healthcare options for the poor. Add to that an excellent turn by corrupt, prostitute-loving hospital manager Barrow (Bobb), and wide-eyed country nurse Lucy (Hewson) whose innocence rapidly disappears once she walks through the Knick’s doors.


theories of evolution through natural selection, to further work on genetic traits in the fruit fly by cell biologist Thomas Morgan and the subsequent search for the “missing” biochemical mechanism that makes it all possible, in which Watson and Crick were so instrumental. “Message; movement; information; form; Darwin; Mendel; Morgan:


all was writ into that precarious assemblage of molecules.” Mukherjee’s history is also intimate not just in his research interest


but through the interplay of genetics in his own family where there is a history of schizophrenia, such that he felt compelled to inform his fiancée: “It was only fair... that I should come with a letter of warning.” The structure of the book is chronological, sidestepping through the


major developments in genetics by scientists working in partnership or competition or sometimes – as with Mendel – in painful isolation. Mendel’s seminal paper was not “rediscovered” until 1900, after his death, by the English biologist William Bateson who later wrote: “When power is discovered, man will always turn to it…The science of heredity will soon provide power on a stupendous scale.” It is a prescient observation that Mukherjee explores in the latter half


of the book, looking at the growth of biotechnology, the vast and even “dangerous” potential of recombinant DNA, cloning, gene therapy and the sequencing of the entire human genome, recording our evolutionary history in the carcasses of inactivated genes “littered throughout its length, like fossils decaying on a beach”. This is a profound and engrossing book.


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