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Watson Lecture Reading List

Image of Rob Philiips leaning against a desk with shelves of books behind him
Credit: Mario de Lopez

Watson Lecture Reading List

The Hidden Poetry of the Genome with Rob Phillips February 26th, 2025

"My talk will focus on one of the great modern challenges in science. What do all of the letters strung together in genomes actually mean? The idea of this reading list is to provide a wide variety of opportunities to learn more about our understanding of genes and the genome, setting the stage for the many outstanding questions in the field. Some of these books are what one might call 'popular science' and others are more specialized." - Rob Phillips


Cover of the book, The Eighth Day of Creation
The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology by Horace Freeland Judson

This book is a brilliant and subjective accounting of the rise of modern molecular biology. Judson undertook a series of interviews with many of the founders of the subject including famed Caltech professors Max Delbrück and Seymour Benzer. Though the technical level is pretty high, this remains an indispensable source for understanding the modern molecular conception of biology. The chapter on François Jacob and Jacques Monod tells the history of how we came to the modern genomic Rosetta Stone.


Cover of the book, Fred Sanger A biography
Fred Sanger—Double Nobel Laureate: A Biography by George G. Brownlee

Before there is any Rosetta Stone to decipher, we must first know the arrangement of the As, Cs, Gs, and Ts making up the genome. Frederick Sanger figured out how to read the sequence of proteins, famously working out the amino acid sequence of insulin, and then to read the sequence of DNA, starting with the virus discussed in the Watson Lecture of Professor Bil Clemons. This book provides an inspiring (but somewhat technical) story of an extremely dedicated researcher who was key to the emergence of modern biology.


Cover of the book, The Gene, an intimate history
The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Mukherjee is a brilliant and insightful writer with three great books to his name, all of which I give the strongest possible recommendation. This book traces the history of our understanding of the laws of heredity and how it led to the emergence of the concept of a gene.


Cover of the book, The Least Likely Man
The Least Likely Man: Marshall Nirenberg and the Discovery of the Genetic Code by Franklin Portugal

One of the stunning and signature achievements of modern biology was the solution of the “coding problem”—the link between what Francis Crick called “the two great polymer languages.” How does a sequence of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts give rise to the sequences of proteins built up from 20 different amino acids? The inspiring story of the ever-underestimated Marshall Nirenberg gives an intriguing picture of what it meant to be a young and mediocre Jewish student in a time of overt antisemitism. I remain deeply inspired by what Nirenberg and his collaborators accomplished using a conceptually very simple idea.


Cover of the book, Neanderthal Man
Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes by Svante Pääbo

This is a personal view of the quest to understand ancient DNA from one of the main founders of the field. Part of the importance of deciphering the genomic Rosetta Stone is to better understand how genomes are altered over the course of evolution, and Pääbo tells a fascinating story of how we have come to understand ancient DNA.


Cover of the book, The Serengeti Rules, The Quest to Discover How Life Works and How It Matters
Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters by Sean B. Carroll

Carroll’s book shows one of the most common ways in which biological systems are regulated using a mechanism known as double-negative feedback. Otters control sea urchins which control kelp. In my talk, I will discuss how sugar controls a gene that controls the enzyme responsible for the digestion of that sugar. My use of the words “genomic Rosetta Stone” refers to the fact that we still have so much to discover and understand about how organisms control their genes. Sean Carroll’s book shows the generality of certain regulatory strategies.


Cover of the book, So Simple a Beginning
So Simple a Beginning: How Four Physical Principles Shape Our Living World by Raghuveer Parthasarathy

This beautiful book gives an overview of how a physicist thinks about life. His discussion of the lac operon, the genetic circuit used by bacteria to metabolize the sugar lactose, is very well done and hints at the kinds of things that I will talk about.


Cover of the book, Wetware, a computer in every living cell
Wetware: A Computer in Every Living Cell by Dennis Bray

Bray is a luminary of modern biology who has worked on how cells make decisions and how they move in response to those decisions. His use of the term “wetware” is meant to conjure the notions of software and hardware, and his argument here is that cells make computations as part of their life process. My discussion of the unknown parts of the genome ties directly into his book. Though this book is now dated, one of my book co-authors has a rule that he reads this book at least once each year.