I studied information retrieval for bioinformatics applications for my Master’s thesis in computer science. Besides reading technical scientific papers and books on information retrieval and bioinformatics, I also read some popular books on genomics.
The following photo shows two of these:
The first, Matt Ridley’s Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters
, has one chapter for each pair of chromosomes in the human genome. Ridley is a very engaging popular science writer, and I recommend the book highly. (I also enjoyed his book on how human sexuality has shaped our evolution, The Red Queen
.)
The second book is The Double Helix
, James D. Watson’s account of the discovery of the double helical structure of DNA. The book, and its author, are both very controversial, and the account given in the book is generally considered to be unfairly biased in favour of Watson. Nevertheless, it was an interesting read for being a first-hand account of a major scientific discovery.
– davinci 11772
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