- Hardcover: 240 pages
- Publisher: Financial Times/ Prentice Hall; 1 edition (8 Sep 2009)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0137153856
- ISBN-13: 978-0137153855
- Product Dimensions: 23.2 x 16.2 x 1.9 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,360,141 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
Chips, Clones, and Living Beyond 100
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Product Description
Product Description
The key scientific discoveries of the 21st century will emerge from the biosciences. These discoveries will impact our lives in ways we can only now begin to imagine. In this book, two of the field's leading experts help us imagine those impacts. Paul and Joyce A. Schoemaker tour the remarkable field of biosciences as it stands today, and preview the directions and innovations that are most likely to emerge in the coming years. They offer a clear, non-technical overview of crucial current developments that are likely to have enormous impact, and address issues ranging from increased human longevity to global warming, bio-warfare to personalized medicine. Along the way, they illuminate each of the exciting technologies and hot-button issues associated with contemporary biotechnology - including stem cells, cloning, probiotics, DNA microarrays, proteomics, gene therapy, and a whole lot more. The Schoemakers identify emerging economic, political, and technical drivers and obstacles that are likely to powerfully impact the way the biosciences progress. Then, drawing on Paul Schoemaker's unsurpassed experience helping global organizations prepare for the future, the authors sketch multiple long-term scenarios for the biosciences - and reveal how they will impact your health, family, career, society, even the Earth itself.
From the Back Cover
“A stimulating and exciting look at how we got to the present state of health care and where we can potentially go. A unique perspective and a great read.”
David Lester, Ph.D., President, ITHW Inc.; formerly Director, Human Health Technologies, Pfizer Inc.
“The explosion of new knowledge in the biosciences will raise important challenges for our social, ethical, and economic thinking. The Schoemakers have given us an incredibly useful book to stimulate that thinking. One could not ask for a better guidebook to an exciting if challenging future.”
Professor Arthur L. Caplan, Director of the Center for Bioethics and Hart Professor, University of Pennsylvania
“What a fascinating book! The authors have really mastered all the aspects (social, human, scientific, and business) of the biomedical revolution that is taking place this century. Awesome.”
Giancarlo Barolat,M.D., Director, Barolat Neuroscience, Presbyterian St. Luke Medical Center, Denver; formerly Professor of Neurosurgery at Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia
“Wonderfully comprehensive, yet still digestible for non-scientists. Wish I had this book when we examined some health care innovation opportunities at GE; it would have provided a great foundation for the team.”
Patia McGrath, Global Director - Innovation and Strategic Connections, Corporate Marketing, General Electric
The key scientific discoveries of the 21st century are coming from the biosciences. These discoveries will impact our lives in ways we can only begin to imagine. Now, two leading experts will help you imagine those impacts--and prepare for them. Paul and Joyce Schoemaker preview the research innovations most likely to emerge in the coming years and reveal what they’re likely to mean for everything from human longevity to the health of society, from bioterrorism to personalized medicine.
Writing for every interested citizen and consumer, the Schoemakers illuminate the hottest technologies and most controversial issues associated with contemporary biotechnology--including stem cells, cloning, pharmacogenetics, DNA chips, proteomics, gene therapy, and much more. Then, drawing on Paul Schoemaker’s unsurpassed experience helping global organizations prepare for the future, the authors sketch multiple long-term scenarios for the biosciences…and reveal how they will impact your health, family, career, and the society you live in.
• How long will you live? How long can you live?
Beyond 100: breakthroughs made, breakthroughs yet to come
• New business opportunities for the age of biosciences
The future of pharmaceuticals, medical devices, diagnostics, disease management, and prevention
• The economics, politics, and technology of the bioscience revolution
What’s driving the biosciences--and what could halt them dead in their tracks
• To 2025 and beyond: powerful scenarios and what they mean
Making sense of the age of biosciences--so you can make better decisions for you and your family
Inside This Book
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Kindle Edition
Not bad on the whole. It is a book well written for a lay person who wants to understand more about science and how it is conditioning our life and may effect our life in the future.
Most of the scientific information written in the book I already knew but that because I had studied it and it is part of my current job.
The scientific information is posed in an easy and digestible way. I found the diagrams and flow charts quite straight forward and easily understandably even if someone has no scientific background. So thumbs up for that. It is not always easy to explain complex scientific methodology to students, let alone to people who is not there usual cup of tea.
What I liked reading about were the implications that these discoveries can have both on the individual and on the society at large. The political and ethical deductions that scientific discovery can eventually bring about in our daily life.
There where things I didn't think about.
For example, what happens when the population will eventually keep on ageing? The social and family side-effects correlated to it? The physiological turn-over that is healthy for society to grow?
What will happen with all the genetical, medical and pharmaceutical data that is being gathered and stored on each one of us? Will that eventually effect our choice of jobs, choice of partner and offspring, access to social security and health insurance? Preclude us from specific medical treatment?
How will all this be justly balanced?
Well this is a question that the book didn't answer but most probably it was not it job to do so.
It is however a issue that each one of us has to ponder and discuss about.
So what I can say about this book is that I have no learnt anything new about the scientific part but for sure it helped me look at science from the social point of view and that has definitely been an eye opener.
Most of the scientific information written in the book I already knew but that because I had studied it and it is part of my current job.
The scientific information is posed in an easy and digestible way. I found the diagrams and flow charts quite straight forward and easily understandably even if someone has no scientific background. So thumbs up for that. It is not always easy to explain complex scientific methodology to students, let alone to people who is not there usual cup of tea.
What I liked reading about were the implications that these discoveries can have both on the individual and on the society at large. The political and ethical deductions that scientific discovery can eventually bring about in our daily life.
There where things I didn't think about.
For example, what happens when the population will eventually keep on ageing? The social and family side-effects correlated to it? The physiological turn-over that is healthy for society to grow?
What will happen with all the genetical, medical and pharmaceutical data that is being gathered and stored on each one of us? Will that eventually effect our choice of jobs, choice of partner and offspring, access to social security and health insurance? Preclude us from specific medical treatment?
How will all this be justly balanced?
Well this is a question that the book didn't answer but most probably it was not it job to do so.
It is however a issue that each one of us has to ponder and discuss about.
So what I can say about this book is that I have no learnt anything new about the scientific part but for sure it helped me look at science from the social point of view and that has definitely been an eye opener.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
45 reviews
33 of 34 people found the following review helpful
Brief, Misleading at Times, and...Brief
23 Oct 2009
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review
(What's this?)
I am not sure what the point of this book was intended to be. Perhaps it is intended as a primer to businesspeople to lure them into investing in biosciences research. My second best guess is that this is intended as a means to make investors feel like they understand this technology, so that they can feel comfortable trading in these stocks. These goals seem likeliest, as opposed to, you know, actually TEACHING something, as it is not as accurate as it should be in many respects.
For example, easily checked facts were wrong. On page 4, the research of Dr. Cynthia Kenyon on daf-2 (italics!) is mentioned. This was not the first discovery of a longevity gene, or even one in C. elegans (I wish there were italics available in reviews!). To the best of my knowledge, the earliest discovery of such a gene was in 1988, five years earlier, Tom Johnson and his colleagues identified and cloned a gene named age-1, which has many of the same effects as daf-2 (they are, in fact, in the same genetic pathway).
A similar mistake is made on the NEXT page, where SIR2 is discussed. This gene, while prolonging lifespan, is ALSO in the genetic pathway of daf-2, which means that the effects of disrupting them will almost certainly not prove to be additive. In all probability, I could have done this all day, except that they stopped mentioning specific scientific findings after the first chapter, and began to mention generalities and technologies, instead, such as the potential to use monoclonal antibodies as anti-cancer vaccination therapies. While these are scientific breakthroughs, they are not scientific findings. This is no more scientific than a discussion of microprocessor architecture would be. This is engineering, not science. And while engineering is what takes science from a lab to a hospital and while understanding engineering is more likely to lead to solid predictions of future market results than understanding science, these are not the claims. Even this is doesn't preclude them from dramatic, and critical, errors, as they conflate pluripotent and totipotent stem cells on pg. 50 and 51, which means that a true understanding of the potentials and pitfalls of these treatments remains elusive.
If this were not enough, there are other problems that are non-factual. For example, pages 110 and 112 both feature a chart of the world. Both are labeled to be the Global Malaria Report from 2008, courtesy of the WHO. The problem is that the chart on pg. 110 is intended to represent the spread of AIDS, not malaria.
Mistakes aside, there is relatively little information that is new to someone who has had a basic molecular biology course. From this perspective, there is no reason to read this book. I guess if you don't know anything about it at all, this probably would be a good enough primer, if you are interested mainly from the point of view of what is technically possible and not from the perspective of actually learning how and why these discoveries were made or what they mean.
In short, if you are looking for some guide to what is possible, this is a good beginning. If you are looking for something more detailed, take Alberts Molecular Biology of the Cell. If you are interested in investing in this material, go invest in some research, not in stock. Nothing here will give you the vaguest idea as to what will or will not succeed, so as far as investing advice goes, I would consider it highly dubious.
For example, easily checked facts were wrong. On page 4, the research of Dr. Cynthia Kenyon on daf-2 (italics!) is mentioned. This was not the first discovery of a longevity gene, or even one in C. elegans (I wish there were italics available in reviews!). To the best of my knowledge, the earliest discovery of such a gene was in 1988, five years earlier, Tom Johnson and his colleagues identified and cloned a gene named age-1, which has many of the same effects as daf-2 (they are, in fact, in the same genetic pathway).
A similar mistake is made on the NEXT page, where SIR2 is discussed. This gene, while prolonging lifespan, is ALSO in the genetic pathway of daf-2, which means that the effects of disrupting them will almost certainly not prove to be additive. In all probability, I could have done this all day, except that they stopped mentioning specific scientific findings after the first chapter, and began to mention generalities and technologies, instead, such as the potential to use monoclonal antibodies as anti-cancer vaccination therapies. While these are scientific breakthroughs, they are not scientific findings. This is no more scientific than a discussion of microprocessor architecture would be. This is engineering, not science. And while engineering is what takes science from a lab to a hospital and while understanding engineering is more likely to lead to solid predictions of future market results than understanding science, these are not the claims. Even this is doesn't preclude them from dramatic, and critical, errors, as they conflate pluripotent and totipotent stem cells on pg. 50 and 51, which means that a true understanding of the potentials and pitfalls of these treatments remains elusive.
If this were not enough, there are other problems that are non-factual. For example, pages 110 and 112 both feature a chart of the world. Both are labeled to be the Global Malaria Report from 2008, courtesy of the WHO. The problem is that the chart on pg. 110 is intended to represent the spread of AIDS, not malaria.
Mistakes aside, there is relatively little information that is new to someone who has had a basic molecular biology course. From this perspective, there is no reason to read this book. I guess if you don't know anything about it at all, this probably would be a good enough primer, if you are interested mainly from the point of view of what is technically possible and not from the perspective of actually learning how and why these discoveries were made or what they mean.
In short, if you are looking for some guide to what is possible, this is a good beginning. If you are looking for something more detailed, take Alberts Molecular Biology of the Cell. If you are interested in investing in this material, go invest in some research, not in stock. Nothing here will give you the vaguest idea as to what will or will not succeed, so as far as investing advice goes, I would consider it highly dubious.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful
I'll take future possibilities with a side order of science, please...
12 Dec 2009
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review
(What's this?)
When I ordered this book, I figured I'd be learning about new and emerging technologies that would increase the quality of life for everyone on our little planet.
Unfortunately, I should have read the product description a little more carefully - as you'll see below, this book focuses more on future possibilities of the year 2025 and less on the bioscience technologies themselves.
I'll pick apart the back cover descriptions to illustrate my dissatisfaction with this book. Let's start from the top:
["A stimulating and exciting look at how we got to the present state of health care and where we can potentially go. A unique perspective and a great read." David Lester, Ph.D., President, ITHW Inc.; formerly Director, Human Health Technologies, Pfizer Inc.]
That's the key phrase: where we can _potentially_ go. Several chapters in this novel make projections about the biosciences and how improvements or failures can affect family structures, economics, business, and so forth. The first chapter glosses over a few breakthroughs of living beyond 100, but quickly moves to discussing if the world can afford a large centenarian age group. This happens over and over throughout the book - a technology is briefly discussed, and the topic switches to how it could affect the future in various ways.
["The explosion of new knowledge in the biosciences will raise important challenges for our social, ethical, and economic thinking. The Schoemakers have given us an incredibly useful book to stimulate that thinking. One could not ask for a better guidebook to an exciting if challenging future." Professor Arthur L. Caplan, Director of the Center for Bioethics and Hart Professor, University of Pennsylvania]
I don't know if I'd call this a guidebook. As far as thinking, it basically tells us what most people already know - people are afraid of change and the sciences always fight an uphill battle with research, testing, implementation, and can be set back decades if failures occur, such as 3 Mile Island causing the cessation of nuclear power plant construction in the U.S.
["What a fascinating book! The authors have really mastered all the aspects (social, human, scientific, and business) of the biomedical revolution that is taking place this century. Awesome." Giancarlo Barolat,M.D., Director, Barolat Neuroscience, Presbyterian St. Luke Medical Center, Denver; formerly Professor of Neurosurgery at Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia]
This is true, but to a point - there is a chapter titled "Snapshot of the biosciences", which says it all. The chapter has an all-too-brief overview of cloning, protein based technologies, and not even a full page is given to the subject of DNA chips. This is what I wanted to read about, but I was left wanting after 20 pages.
["Wonderfully comprehensive, yet still digestible for non-scientists. Wish I had this book when we examined some health care innovation opportunities at GE; it would have provided a great foundation for the team." Patia McGrath, Global Director - Innovation and Strategic Connections, Corporate Marketing, General Electric]
Digestible? Yes. I don't know if I'd agree with comprehensive. When you consider that chapters 1-3 are primarily on the biosciences and chapters 4-9 explore business models, the healthcare system, possible future wildcards and societal reactions, it's clear that science gets the low end of attention in this book.
This is not a book which focuses on bioscience, it focuses on possible futures that could come about if people embrace or prohibit the bioscience movement. While entertaining and thought-provoking, I was found wanting more.
Okay, but not what I expected. I'd suggest passing on this book.
Unfortunately, I should have read the product description a little more carefully - as you'll see below, this book focuses more on future possibilities of the year 2025 and less on the bioscience technologies themselves.
I'll pick apart the back cover descriptions to illustrate my dissatisfaction with this book. Let's start from the top:
["A stimulating and exciting look at how we got to the present state of health care and where we can potentially go. A unique perspective and a great read." David Lester, Ph.D., President, ITHW Inc.; formerly Director, Human Health Technologies, Pfizer Inc.]
That's the key phrase: where we can _potentially_ go. Several chapters in this novel make projections about the biosciences and how improvements or failures can affect family structures, economics, business, and so forth. The first chapter glosses over a few breakthroughs of living beyond 100, but quickly moves to discussing if the world can afford a large centenarian age group. This happens over and over throughout the book - a technology is briefly discussed, and the topic switches to how it could affect the future in various ways.
["The explosion of new knowledge in the biosciences will raise important challenges for our social, ethical, and economic thinking. The Schoemakers have given us an incredibly useful book to stimulate that thinking. One could not ask for a better guidebook to an exciting if challenging future." Professor Arthur L. Caplan, Director of the Center for Bioethics and Hart Professor, University of Pennsylvania]
I don't know if I'd call this a guidebook. As far as thinking, it basically tells us what most people already know - people are afraid of change and the sciences always fight an uphill battle with research, testing, implementation, and can be set back decades if failures occur, such as 3 Mile Island causing the cessation of nuclear power plant construction in the U.S.
["What a fascinating book! The authors have really mastered all the aspects (social, human, scientific, and business) of the biomedical revolution that is taking place this century. Awesome." Giancarlo Barolat,M.D., Director, Barolat Neuroscience, Presbyterian St. Luke Medical Center, Denver; formerly Professor of Neurosurgery at Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia]
This is true, but to a point - there is a chapter titled "Snapshot of the biosciences", which says it all. The chapter has an all-too-brief overview of cloning, protein based technologies, and not even a full page is given to the subject of DNA chips. This is what I wanted to read about, but I was left wanting after 20 pages.
["Wonderfully comprehensive, yet still digestible for non-scientists. Wish I had this book when we examined some health care innovation opportunities at GE; it would have provided a great foundation for the team." Patia McGrath, Global Director - Innovation and Strategic Connections, Corporate Marketing, General Electric]
Digestible? Yes. I don't know if I'd agree with comprehensive. When you consider that chapters 1-3 are primarily on the biosciences and chapters 4-9 explore business models, the healthcare system, possible future wildcards and societal reactions, it's clear that science gets the low end of attention in this book.
This is not a book which focuses on bioscience, it focuses on possible futures that could come about if people embrace or prohibit the bioscience movement. While entertaining and thought-provoking, I was found wanting more.
Okay, but not what I expected. I'd suggest passing on this book.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Textbookish
22 Dec 2009
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review
(What's this?)
While chock-full of great information, this book is unfortunately written too much like a textbook for my taste (i.e., it puts me to sleep when I try to read it for too long in a single sitting). From other books of this type I have read, I know this information can be made more palatable for the non-scientist, so I was a bit disappointed that this text - which sounded appealing - wasn't more readable for the lay-person.
That said, for those who do want to learn more about the biosciences and the advances currently being made in the field, this is definitely a good place to start.
That said, for those who do want to learn more about the biosciences and the advances currently being made in the field, this is definitely a good place to start.
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