This book has a very interesting premise and plot; in some sense, it is right up the sci-fi alley. My beef is two-fold:
- has a really slow start
- the ending is just weird
It is almost like the story twists in a exponential way. I did like the concept of systematically mapping and categorizing the building blocks of our DNA, and the possibility of "reprogramming"; just the thought of that is pretty amazing. But I did not really like how the author used a computer hacker to become the genetic engineering guru just by reading a few books. Sure, there are some similarities between the complex systems of a program and the biological instructions stored in protein pairs, but to think that you can simply tweak DNA willy-nilly is quite naive. The author lightly touches on the negative side-affects, but in my mind, it was a gross over-simplification.
As ever, my "litmus test" is that the book did not draw me at all. There was nobody to connect too. There is a hacker who turns his girlfriend into his late sister, the misplaced billionaire who is hated but charitable, and a CDC genetic specialist who is at the forefront of genetic engineering but seems to do nothing productive with it.
