Tears Of The Cheetah: And Other Tales From The Genetic Frontier

Tears of the Cheetah: And Other Tales from the Genetic Frontier

The history of life on Earth is dominated by extinction events so numerous that over 99.9% of the species ever to have existed are gone forever. If animals could talk, we would ask them to recall their own ancestries, in particular the secrets as to how they avoided almost inevitable annihilation in the face of daily assaults by predators, climactic cataclysms, deadly infections and innate diseases.In Tears of the Cheetah, medical geneticist and conservationist Stephen J. O'Brien narrates fast-moving science adventure stories that explore the mysteries of survival among the earth's most endangered and beloved wildlife. Here we uncover the secret histories of exotic species such as Indonesian orangutans, humpback whales, and the imperiled cheetah-the world's fastest animal which nonetheless cannot escape its own genetic weaknesses.Among these genetic detective stories we also discover how the Serengeti lions have lived with FIV (the feline version of HIV), where giant pandas really come from, how bold genetic action pulled the Florida panther from the edge of extinction, how the survivors of the medieval Black Death passed on a genetic gift to their descendents, and how mapping the genome of the domestic cat solved a murder case in Canada.With each riveting account of animal resilience and adaptation, a remarkable parallel in human medicine is drawn, adding yet another rationale for species conservation-mining their genomes for cures to our own fatal diseases. Tears of the Cheetah offers a fascinating glimpse of the insight gained when geneticists venutre into the wild.From Publishers WeeklyThe 14 firsthand evolutionary yarns collected here are the equivalent of genomic Aesop's fables. By turns passionate, understated, unexpectedly literate and historically astute, O'Brien, head of the National Institutes of Health's Laboratory of Genomic Diversity, is a breath of fresh air: he's written a genetics book that neither probes the ambiguous legacy of genetic engineering nor seeks to entice us with yet another last-word account of the race to map the human genome-and judiciously dispensing with jargon wherever possible, O'Brien's a smooth read as well. The author does not tell us the genetic fable of how the leopard got its spots, but he comes close. The title story recounts his research team's startling discovery of near-complete genetic uniformity among cheetahs, derived possibly from a brush with extinction that forced inbreeding. O'Brien enters a century-old debate on the taxonomy of the endangered panda, whether it belongs to the bear or the raccoon family: a little molecular-genetic detective work revealed it to be either, depending on the species (there is actually more than one). He reads and learns from the genetic histories of the humpback whale and other exotic species. An underlying theme of the book is how these parables illuminate human medicine-how, for example, insights into cat immunodeficiency could lead to a cure for AIDS; another could be said to be self-congratulation for his articles in Nature, his textbook citations and press clippings. But this is only a minor irritation. O'Brien is an explorer of the first order, intrepid and curious. His accomplishments, including this modest book, are considerable.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.From The New England Journal of MedicineFor a molecular biologist, Stephen O'Brien has led an adventuresome life. Tears of the Cheetah recounts how the pursuit of molecular biology in his laboratory led to some of his far-flung pursuits. He collected sperm from wild East African cheetahs on the Serengeti Plain; placated a Dutch princess who thought he was shooting Tanzanian lions with bullets, rather than with anesthetizing darts; chased humpback whales in a Zodiac rubber raft; cuddled a baby giant panda in a thick Chinese bamboo forest; confronted a crown prosecutor during a Prince Edward Island murder trial in reference to the id