Touching on early beliefs about heredity and Mendel's careful experiments with garden peas, Shapiro quickly moves to a blow-by-blow description of the discovery of the structure of DNA and the various individuals and laboratories who were involved in the search for the carrier of our genetic information. He delves just far enough into the private lives of the scientists to bring them to life as human beings. From Mendel's experiments with garden peas to Watson's and Crick's discovery of the double helix, Shapiro carries us to the threshhold of mapping the human genome. Shapiro's text is as relevant today, when the mapping of the human genome is complete, as it was in 1991 when his book was published. The history is still the same and the science leading up to the human genome map is as valid as it was then. Without a good background in science, I sometimes found it a bit hard going, but Shapiro's clear prose carried me through on the back of my intense interest in his topic. (December 2007) ( )