Books with title The Double Helix Book

Amid rumors of miracle cures, a California-based bio-tech company has pulled up stakes and moved to the island of Grenada in the Eastern Caribbean. When investigative reporter Kate Lipton is hired by Science America magazine to check it out, she quickly learns that Vikon and its cunning CEO Anthony Beecher are elusive. Kate, now based on the island of Bequia in the British West Indies with her partner, Jack Sullivan, wades into this high-stakes thicket, traveling to New York, to San Francisco, and back to the Caribbean, in search of answers. If Vikon is simply onto an AIDS cure, why aren't they shouting it from the rooftops? And why relocate to Grenada? Kate and Jack sail to Grenada to anchor in view of Vikon's complex and discover Vikon's yacht the Chimera ferrying a steady stream of high-profile celebrities and Fortune 500 types to and from Grenada's main airport. Kate decides she must "follow the money" by penetrating Vikon's complex computer system. Tension mounts as the risk of detection looms and Kate must ultimately face off against Beecher and his security team. As answers unfold, Kate discovers the true nature of Vikon's remarkable break-through and must ask how it might impact the world. How might the planet survive a human species that could well become virtually immortal? And just because scientists can do a thing, should they? Who is to decide thorny ethical issues facing humankind in a world of explosive bio-tech break-throughs? If the secret to longevity has been discovered in our DNA, who should receive the costly treatments, and again, who decides? A corporate elite where profit is the ruling ethos? Here is an ethical wilderness our world will likely face in the not-too-distant future. For the genetic key to our biological clocks is, in truth, almost at hand. Double Helix is a riveting high-tech thriller wrapped around a rousing sailing adventure and poignant love story.

To the untrained eye, Photo 51 was simply a grainy black and white image of dark marks scattered in a rough cross shape. But to the eye of a trained scientist, it was a clear portrait of a DNA fiber taken with X-rays. And to young scientists James Watson and Francis Crick, it confirmed their guess of deoxyribonucleic acid’s structure. In 1953 the pair was racing toward solving the mystery of DNA’s structure before other scientists could beat them to it. They and others believed that finding the simple structure of the DNA molecule would answer a great mystery—how do organisms live, grow, develop, and survive, generation after generation? Photo 51 and subsequent models based on the photo would prove to be the key to unlocking the secret of life.