The Art of Genes: How Organisms Make Themselves

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Summary: Chickens, and eggs
Review: Charming and clear introduction to the basic 'how to' of development with a lot of information about hox genes in relation to form and function, with an engaging twist, the questions of art from symmetry to creativity. This is the best short introduction to very recent findings in a field transformed in the eighties and only now becoming public knowldege.

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Summary: Very non technical, and very instructive
Review: Embryological development has been one of the big questions in biology for a long time, and there are now solidly supported theories of how it works. There are two "popular" books -- The Triumph of the Embryo, and this one. This is very non-technical, and more entertaining. Coen uses metaphors drawn from art to explain the ideas. The central idea is the distribution of "hidden colors" through the organism at various stages; the genes react to and interpret these "colors".

One complaint: no color diagrams!

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Summary: The Art of Explaining
Review: I always had the feeling that evolution was the inventor of new things and development was a secondary problem of how to build an organism from information already present in the fertilised egg. Now I know what problems need to be solved in building a multicellular organism from a single cell in the first place. Enrico Coen magnificently explains how the head-tail, ventral-dorsal, left-right and inside-outside axis is build out of nearly nothing. The subtitle of the book is a perfect illustration of the task: How organisms make themselves (without help from outside). The problem looked only harder since the discovery of DNA : the information in DNA is one-dimensional, so how to build a 3-dimensional organism on the basis of that? No wonder that people in previous centuries saw miniature humans in egg or sperm. But since that 'solution' was refuted, the problem confronted us again: how do organisms make themselves? Enrico Coen gives deep insights with the help of metaphors derived from art and with the necessary scientific details and without confusing us with too many complexities. Coen explains the crucial role of genes without being a genetic reductionist. His examples are both from animals and plants, wich I find an advantage. This book is an achievement. The only criticism I have is that the main metaphor Coen uses is about colors and all the illustrations are in black-and-white! At least the hardback edition should have color illustrations!

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Summary: Wow! Read this one...
Review: I've read a number of popular books on genetics. If you really want to know how a gene's influence unfolds in your body, this is the definitive book to read. Nobody is better than Dr. Coen at explaining how genes work in colorful metaphors that the layperson can understand. He writes concise summaries at the end of every chapter (Why don't other popular science writers do that?) Highly recommended reading.

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Summary: Developmental biology in a new light.
Review: Perhaps not the first time, but certainly one of the most eloquent and thought-provoking exposition of the wonderfully complex subject of biological development. The author first seems to invoke a parallel relationship of development and creativity as yin and yang, but finishes off the book with an intriguing explanation that human creativity is itself a byproduct, consequence, or continuum of development.

The Biology undergrad or grad student may have grasped the fundamentals of developmental biology from "Molecular Biology of the Cell" (Alberts, Watson, et al), "Developmental Biology" (Gilbert), or "Genes, Embryos, and Evolution" (Gerhart and Kirschner). Enrico Coen's book, however, certainly provides a fresh outlook of plant and animal development rich with comparisons to artistic creativity, hidden colors, scents and sensitivities, interpretations, elaborations, and refinements. This outlook also raises the question of whether genes that dictate development can be compared to instruction manuals or artists painting their canvas---in the case of development, the instruction and execution are inseparable, and the genes are affected by the organisms they produce in a similar way that the artist responds to his/her own creation.

Anyone with a molecular biology background can worry less about the details of gene regulation, differential gene expression, and protein-DNA and protein-protein interactions. By focusing instead on metaphors or analogies in art and creativity, delving in Dr. Coen's thoughts becomes an enjoyable exercise in imagination. On the other hand, readers who need more grounding in basic molecular biology may find the analogies daunting, but Dr. Coen explains the formidably complex and amazingly orchestrated system of the development of the multicellular organism very well. The reader acquires a new appreciation of development using the mind's color receptors and chemical senses.

I wonder, as a non-developmental biologist, if Dr. Coen has inadvertently left some gaping holes in trying to explain left-right asymmetry. Briefly he ascribes the establishment of this asymmetry to the intrinsic lefthandedness or righthandedness of the building blocks of life, e.g., D-amino acids and L-sugars/monosaccharides. This leaves me wondering whether so much more has been found or observed recently to provide a basis for this morphological asymmetry other than ascribing it to the intrinsic asymmetry of molecular building blocks.

This book will nonetheless stand out as a unique perspective and exposition of one of biology's most perplexing and still most interesting phenomena.

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Summary: how development works
Review: This book explains the essence of developmental biology in a very clear and beautiful way. I highly recommend it to anyone curious as to how an organism is constructed from a fertilized egg and its genes.

Rating:
Summary: how development works
Review: This book explains the essence of developmental biology in a very clear and beautiful way. I highly recommend it to anyone curious as to how an organism is constructed from a fertilized egg and its genes.

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Summary: Some Matter, Much Art
Review: This book takes on one of the big mysteries: how does each animal or plant (or fungus!) turn a single fertilized egg cell into its convoluted, differentiated self? Understanding of development is new and still partial. Over the last twenty years or so scientists have been able to piece together the way certain well-studied organisms (the noble fruit fly, of course, the snapdragon, and a couple others) come to become from a single cell, how a growing body finds its orientation, its myriad internal shapes and differences, without any guiding intelligence. As we see this story unfold, we must again sit back in simple awe at the astronomical possibilities of protein, which makes the tools, the materials, the very jigs and benches where life comes together.

Coen does a good job in taking us on a tour of the issues that will be in play here. Biologists have been struggling for a long time with development, but it is only with the sophistication of modern chemical analysis and the viewpoint of DNA, RNA, and protein machines that the marvelous self-direction of the mechanism is starting to become evident. Amazingly, the flows of proteins from cell to cell via interdicting membranes, the interactions between proteins in one cell and those in another, the ability of a protein to change another, and -- singly or in combination -- to turn on or off specific genes (that do themselves make proteins that may furher elaborate this process) are sufficiently rich methods to build a body. Clearly such an assertion requires much detailed explication, and the author does provide this. But here I think he goes wrong by introducing an analogy to explain development.

The author chooses to bring in the idea of an artist painting a picture as a help to understanding the way an organism builds itself from a single cell. There is, in fact, very little about the way an artist makes a picture that resembles development, except perhaps the notion of progressive refinement. However, none daunted, he introduces "colors" to describe the presence of one or another Master Proteins, and "scents" to describe the effect of certain membrane proteins on the Master Proteins in contacting cells. These colors and scents dominate the discussion thereafter, but must, naturally, be briefly dispensed with here and there as he describes the actual mechanisms in terms of molecules, but then up they pop again.

There is nothing gained by this artificial isomorphism of color for molecule and scent for effect. An analogy, to be of some use, must give the mind a familiar structure as a map to an unfamiliar one. The spread of "colors" and "scents" along the segments of a developing fruit fly or diffusing dorsally/ventrally in a flower bud does not add anything. It actually requires an extra step to translate these colors back into the molecular populations they really are. This picture of molecules diffusing through a body is the conceptually simpler, as well as being, more or less, the actual.

As the book went on I found the discussions of symmetry and handedness to be protracted, and the conclusions drawn interesting but rather muffled by that leisureliness. Explanations of shape and proportion and of how particular patterns arise during growth were too vague, and lost in the talk of painters and painting. Certainly there is much interesting material in this book, but to a very great extent it can stand on its own. Let the occasional painting metaphor season the narrative rather than provide the main ingredient.

(OBSOLESCENCE CAVEAT: apparently the role of RNA in genetic regulation is just now starting to be appreciated. At the time Coen wrote, none of that was even suspected.)

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Summary: An amazing gem
Review: This small book does nothing short of explaining the details of developmental biology in such an approachable synthesis that it should be required reading for all biology majors and their professors. Coen's understanding of his subject is obvious, but his ability to convey it is the amazing gem of this book. Success achieved!