CRACKING THE GENOME: Inside the Race to Unlock Human DNA.

CRACKING THE GENOME: Inside the Race to Unlock Human DNA by Kevin Davies Free Press, $25.00

COULD A JOURNALIST WORKING entirely from news accounts write an effective history of the war in Vietnam before the fall of Saigon? That's the kind of task Kevin Davies has set himself in Cracking the Genome: Inside the Race to Unlock Human DNA. For the past 12 years, an international consortium has been methodically deriving the sequence of the 3 billion nucleotides that make up the human genome. The pace of sequencing picked up appreciably a few years ago when a U.S. company, Celera Genomics, vowed to do the job much faster, partly as a way to secure commercial rights to valuable genetic information.

Neither sequencing effort is finished. A hyped-up news conference last summer to celebrate the "completion" of the sequencing had more to do with politics, patenting, and the stock market than with science. Celera and the international genome project are both still filling in gaps and correcting errors. Given the difficulties that are anticipated in the final stages of sequencing, it will probably be necessary at some point to declare victory and walk away.

Davies does an excellent job of summarizing the last dozen years of genetics news. He has read everything he possibly can about James Watson, the co-discoverer with Francis Crick of the structure of DNA and the first director of the U.S. government's genome program; Francis Collins, a former University of Michigan researcher who took over the genome program in 1993; and Craig Venter, a researcher who left the National Institutes of Health to found first the privately funded Institute for Genomic Research and later Celera. Davies must have filing cabinets full of articles about the competition between the government and Celera, and the potential uses of sequence data. Unfortunately, the book reads more like a fantastically detailed clip job than like a coherent story.

Davies tries to put events in context but is prone to rampant overenthusiasm. Sequencing the genome is alternately described as a "staggering achievement," "the defining moment in the evolution of mankind," "the greatest adventure of modern science," and "the sacred birthright of humanity." It is compared to the invention of the wheel, the realization that the Earth goes around the sun, the Apollo moon landings, and finally understanding "the language of God" (to which I replied, in the margins of my copy of the book, "Not my God").

Actually, the sequencing of the human genome hasn't been any of these things. It has been a classic case of bureaucratic science, the ultimate piece of grind-it-out biology. Deriving the sequence has not been an act of inspired creativity, like Einstein's development of relativity theory, or even Watson and Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953. If the human genome hadn't been more or less sequenced last year, it would have been sequenced this year, or next year. As soon as the tools needed to do the job became available, it had to be done.

In that respect, Collins, Watson, and Venter come across more as bureaucrats than as scientists. Their job has been to marshal the troops and spin the press, with an occasional stop by the lab to see how things are going. Davies could have written a book of bureaucratic intrigue, full of oversized egos and scheming subordinates. Instead, he has chosen to focus tightly on the science.

The most interesting part of the story has been Craig Venter's contribution to the sequencing effort, and Davies covers this material well. Venter realized in the early 1990s that the approach being taken by the government was much too conservative. He had several very good ideas about how to do things differently. Fortunately, he was able to find financial backers with pockets deep enough to implement his ideas. And, even more fortunately, his ideas worked.

In the process, Venter was forced to move from the public sector to the private sector, where he had no choice but to try to make money from his work. That raised the ire of his former colleagues, though they would have done exactly the same thing if their positions had been reversed. Venter returned their criticism with scorn, and the science press, usually relegated to colorless stories of receptors and clinical trials, egged on everyone in the conflict to get the best copy possible.

I began this book thinking it would go well beyond what has been reported in the press. As Davies tells us in the very first paragraph, he was the inaugural editor of Nature Genetics, an off-shoot of the prestigious British science journal Nature. He knows the people he's writing about and has published some of their important papers. He should have been able to call them and ask them whatever he wanted. He appears, however, to have written the book having rarely left the library. All this information in a single document is useful, but one gets the sense of an opportunity missed.

Sometimes the writing seems rushed, perhaps in an effort to keep the book as current as possible. Definitions, characterizations, and jokes get repeated. Especially grating is Davies's tendency to describe complicated people with one-term labels: irrepressible, heroic, intellectual, charming.

Still, Davies really does know his biology. His descriptions are clear and accurate. His judgements about what to include and what to exclude are sound. He has a good sense of how the pieces of his story fit together. Chapters that describe the sequencing effort are interspersed with chapters that tell how genetic data are being used, and all are full of information.

If you've been meaning to read all those stories about molecular biology and haven't gotten around to it, this is the perfect book to help you get up to date. But if you want an inside account of what will certainly be a milestone in science, I counsel patience. Davies' book is the first to describe in detail "the race to unlock human DNA." There will be many more.

STEVE OLSON has written about science for The Atlantic Monthly, Science, and other magazines.