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Gene Machine
Gene Machine: The Race to Decipher the Secrets of the Ribosome | Venki Ramakrishnan
3 posts | 1 read | 5 to read
A Nobel Prize-winning biologist tells the riveting story of his race to discover the inner workings of biology's most important molecule "Ramakrishnan's writing is so honest, lucid and engaging that I could not put this book down until I had read to the very end."--Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene Everyone has heard of DNA. But by itself, DNA is just an inert blueprint for life. It is the ribosome--an enormous molecular machine made up of a million atoms--that makes DNA come to life, turning our genetic code into proteins and therefore into us. Gene Machine is an insider account of the race for the structure of the ribosome, a fundamental discovery that both advances our knowledge of all life and could lead to the development of better antibiotics against life-threatening diseases. But this is also a human story of Ramakrishnan's unlikely journey, from his first fumbling experiments in a biology lab to being the dark horse in a fierce competition with some of the world's best scientists. In the end, Gene Machine is a frank insider's account of the pursuit of high-stakes science.
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shanaqui

Distracting myself from bad news with science; it's a little slow and technical, about a topic I'm not interested in, but I hope that it's not going to be *just* about the structure of the ribosome. I know that in biology structure means a lot, but... I want to know more about function!

blurb
shanaqui

This is going slow for me because... Well, however much I know form is function -- and believe me, that's been drilled into me -- I'm not that interested in the minutiae of how we deduce the form of proteins and RNA molecules. It's really cool that we can! But... I want to get to the part where we do stuff with the data. How does it work? What does the structure tell us about how ancient ribosomes are? What do antibiotics bind to and block? Etc.

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charliemarlowe
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Pickpick

This is my current audiobook listen. Unintentionally, it is a good follow up to the Isaac Newton/Royal Society book, because the author is the current president of the Royal Society (like Isaac Newton was). I am getting a bit lost on all the names of the people who‘ve helped him throughout the years though.

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