David Deamer is Research Professor of Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California (Santa Cruz). He recently published First Life: Discovering the Connections between Stars, Cells, and How Life Began (University of California Press, 2011). Deamer's primary research interest focuses on nucleic acid molecules as they are driven electrophoretically through a nanoscopic channel, or nanopore, embedded in a lipid-bilayer membrane. The presence of the polynucleotide in the channel affects the ionic conductance in a manner related to chain length, concentration and base sequence. This observation has considerable potential for characterizing DNA and RNA in microscopic volumes of nucleic acid solutions. In 2014, Oxford Nanopore Technology introduced the MinION, a portable nanopore sequencing instrument that is now undergoing testing by early users. These include NASA scientists who will send MinIONs to the International Space Station.

Wallace Kaufman is a science writer whose fiction, non-fiction, journalism, and poetry have appeared in major magazines and newspapers in the U.S., England, and Kazakhstan. He is a graduate of Duke University and he earned an [...]. from Oxford University. His research and reporting has taken him to Central and South America and to the arctic and Pacific coasts of Siberia. In Latin America he helped indigenous writers establish themselves and translated the first two books by Mayan writer Victor Montejo. In Kazakhstan he worked with Kazakhs on translations of their principal writers. His own translations of German, French and Spanish poetry and fiction have appeared in several magazines. His books include Invasive Plants: Guide to Identification and the Impacts and Control of Common North American Species, co-author with Dr. Sylvan Ramsey Kaufman, Stackpole Books, 2nd edition, 2013, Coming Out of the Woods, a memoir, Perseus Books, 2001, No Turning Back, Basic Books, 1994, Amazon, Gallery Books, Image Bank, 1991 and The Beaches Are Moving: The Drowning of America's Shoreline, Doubleday, 1979; Duke University Press 1984. Co-authored with Dr. Orrin Pilkey.

A compellingly realistic story that highlights potential dangers of our rapidly increasing powers of editing and creating genes

Contains an extensive, fascinating appendix with scientific insights and background material by the authors

Written by authors with the relevant combination of scientific and cultural expertise

Introduces readers to the little-known geopolitics of Central Asia's post-Soviet development

Preface.- Part I: The Novel.- Part II: The Science behind the fiction.