Genetic Science

Who are we, and how did we get here? These are two of the most fundamental and far-reaching questions facing scientists and cosmologists alike and have rested at the center of human intellectual endeavor since its beginning. They are questions that stretch across numerous disciplines. Philosophy, theology, evolutionary biology, and mathematics are just some of the fields looking to explain the emergence of human life.

Synthetic biology promises to reveal how life is created and how it can be re-created, enabling scientists to rewrite the rules of our reality. It could help us, for example, heal without prescription medications, grow meat without harvesting animals, or confront our looming climate catastrophe. Synthetic biology will determine the ways in which we conceive future generations and how we define family, how we identify disease and treat aging, where we make our homes, and how we nourish ourselves.

Rosemary and Peter Grant and those assisting them have spend 20 years on Daphne Major, an island in the Galapagos, studying natural selection. They recognize each individual bird on the island, when there are 400 at the time of the author's visit or when there are over a thousand. They have observed about 20 generations of finches - continuously.Jonathan Weiner follows these scientists as they watch Darwin's finches and come up with a new understanding of life itself.

When his missionary brother renounced faith in favor of atheism, Perry Marshall was plunged into crisis and doubt. He decided: “I”m going to let science make this decision for me.” He asked: “Is the hand at the end of my arm purposeful? Or is it purposeless?” He leapt into the void of evolution and the origin of life. He could not have begun to anticipate what he was about to discover. Living things were far more sophisticated than textbooks were saying.

The Blues are rapidly reproducing, growing more intelligent and lethal each day. With hundreds of millions still covering the earth, the future of humankind looks bleak. Yet Bruce and his Clan refuse to die without a fight to the bitter end. Meanwhile, the remnants of the US government are experimenting on Blues, teaching them how to fire weapons. It’s up to Bruce and his team to stop this atrocity before they lose the only advantage they have over the Blues. They have no idea that what they find will change the course of the human race forever.

In the early 1800s, a century before there was any concept of the gene, physicians in insane asylums began to record causes of madness in their admission books. Almost from the beginning, they pointed to heredity as the most important of these causes. As doctors and state officials steadily lost faith in the capacity of asylum care to stem the terrible increase of insanity, they began emphasizing the need to curb the reproduction of the insane. They became obsessed with identifying weak or tainted families and anticipating the outcomes of their marriages.

Bethany Anne and those in the Etheric Empire have conquered the Aliens who would conquer Earth. However, there are a few that do not appreciate the new rules. Dealing with insurrectionists down on the planet, or with a large military rebellion coming from another system, Bethany Anne and team are ready and willing to give everyone a piece of their mind. Because there is one common attitude that runs in all of those who fight for the Etheric Empire. They will never surrender.

Darwin's theory of evolution is accepted by most educated Americans as simple fact. This easy acceptance, however, hides from us the many ways in which evolution - as an idea - shapes our thinking about a great many things. What if this idea is wrong? What if "evolution" is just a word that covers up scientific ignorance of how the wonders of the living world could have been created? Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson looks at the evidence for Darwinistic evolution the way a lawyer would - with a cold dispassionate eye for logic and proof.

The crew of the legendary Capricious are rich enough to retire in comfort for the rest of their days, but none of it matters if the galaxy is still in danger. Nilah and Boots, the ship's newest crew members, hear the word of a mysterious cult that may have links back to an ancient and all-powerful magic. To find it, hotheaded Nilah will have to go undercover and find the source of their power without revealing her true identity. Meanwhile, Boots is forced to confront the one person she'd hoped never to see again: her old turncoat treasure-hunting partner.

Sergeant Major Shaw and the Deadmen command the only known weapon, the dreadnaught, capable of thwarting the impending collapse of the human race. And their enemies in the Principality know it. The Republic’s farspace planets struggle against the spread of the biological weapon known as the Scourge. One by one they are falling prey to the devastating alien disease. Taking advantage of the Scourge calamity, the Principality embark on a brutal conquest to rule all of humanity.

In a neon-lit near future, the elite is gifted with the technology to make Portraits - perfect copies, designed to bear the weight of their fame. Lulabelle Rock, a star actress, exists again as her thirteenth Portrait. But unlike her predecessors, she's an assassin, meant to erase every version of Lulabelle's past self. As she winds through the maze of Bubble City, her task becomes tangled with a developing conscience and blurred identities. And when she fall's in love with one of her targets, she's faced with a profound dilemma; when you don’t want to kill yourself, what’s the alternative?

Tucked away in Siberia, there are furry, four-legged creatures with wagging tails and floppy ears that are as docile and friendly as any lapdog. But, despite appearances, these are not dogs - they are foxes. They are the result of the most astonishing experiment in breeding ever undertaken - imagine speeding up thousands of years of evolution into a few decades. In 1959, biologists Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut set out to do just that, by starting with a few dozen silver foxes from fox farms in the USSR and attempting to recreate the evolution of wolves into dogs in real time.

In The Genome Odyssey, Dr. Euan Ashley, Stanford professor of medicine and genetics, brings the breakthroughs of precision medicine to vivid life through the real diagnostic journeys of his patients and the tireless efforts of his fellow doctors and scientists as they hunt to prevent, predict, and beat disease.

Not satisfied with the thrills of being one of Greater Los Angeles' toughest cops, Jake Cardigan turns to Tek, a computerized brain stimulant that transports the user to any reality he can imagine. He's soon addicted to this fantasy enabler—and it isn't long before Cardigan is accused of dealing. When he fails to convince the mechanized jury of his innocence, the state strips his badge and sentences him to fifteen years in suspended animation. Four years later, he's awakened. His sentence has been changed, but no one will tell him why.

For six years Anya Korbin worked with Del-Rey Delgato—the genetically altered rebel known as the Coyote Ghost—to free a group of coyote women kept in her father’s lab. As Anya matured into a woman, she and Del-Rey grew close…but then he broke his promise and killed her father. Now she must deal with her animalistic desire for the one who betrayed her.

When the Imminy fleets arrived at Primitea, there was only one name to rally under: the Bloodmancer. With Arthur and Fars at his side, Richard Stavos had become so much more than a Technomancer. His powers had grown beyond what the Guild could have ever taught him. The war had reached every corner of the Galaxy. The Stavos family had to swing its iron fist against enemies in the far reaches of the void as much as against those on Primitea. While Freya took on the mantle of ruler at home, Richard Stavos took the war to the Federation.

Once, Master Commander Carter Rose was the Union’s secret weapon. An augmented, bio-engineered officer in command of the most powerful warship ever devised by human minds, Rose brought them victory against the post-human Aternien Empire. Then they cast him aside. A century later, humanity’s enemy has returned, hell-bent on revenge, and the Union's only hope is the man they had forsaken.

For five centuries, human life has been restricted to Earth, while posthuman descendants called alloys freely explore the galaxy. But when the Earthlike planet of Meru is discovered, two unlikely companions venture forth to test the habitability of this unoccupied new world and the future of human-alloy relations. For Jayanthi, the adopted human child of alloy parents, it’s an opportunity to rectify the ancient reputation of her species as avaricious and destructive, and to give humanity a new place in the universe.

Ancient genetic technology drives world politics as China and the US vie for the power contained in Thailand’s fossil deposits. Deep in an underground CIA facility, Samira studies an unprecedented find, but fears her discoveries will be used as a weapon.

The burgeoning new science of epigenetics offers a cornucopia of insights - some comforting, some frightening. For example, the male fetus may be especially vulnerable to certain common chemicals in our environment, in ways that damage not only his own sperm but also the sperm of his sons. And it’s epigenetics that causes identical twins to vary widely in their susceptibility to dementia and cancer. But here’s the good news: unlike mutations, epigenetic effects are reversible. Indeed, epigenetic engineering is the future of medicine.