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Shrinking the Cat: Genetic Engineering Before We Knew About Genes
by Hubbell, Sue
- Used
- very good
- Hardcover
- first
- Condition
- Very Good/Very Good
- ISBN 10
- 0618040277
- ISBN 13
- 9780618040278
- Seller
-
North Adams, Michigan, United States
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001-10-15. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. Very good hard cover edition with very good dust jacket. 1st Edition. 1st Printing. Clean. Tight binding. No markings. 175 pages.
Synopsis
We humans have been tinkering with genes for a long, long time. In Shrinking the Cat, Sue Hubbell shows how this tinkering is the definition of humanness by telling the stories of four important species we created. She tells how we made cats easier to live with by making them smaller and their brains less complicated, taking out much of the alertness that natural selection had packed in. How ancient farmers turned a wild grass into corn, a tremendously important crop that can't live without us. How silkworms were smuggled from China to the West and bred to be completely dependent on us. How silk traders picked up wild apples in their travels and how we manipulated the apple's complex genetics to grow only the best-tasting ones - and then made them taste worse. Today's tools are new, but we were engineering genes even before we knew about them, and we made some mistakes along the way. For example, the gypsy moths that regularly defoliate trees arrived through efforts to breed silkworms suitable to North America. Genetic engineering is controversial today. Some see it as a source of great benefit and great profits; others see it as a nightmare. Sue Hubbell shows that if we ignore our own history, pretending that genetic engineering is something completely new and dangerous, we are condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past.
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Details
- Bookseller
- Out-of-the-Way Books
(US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- SKU0011632
- Title
- Shrinking the Cat: Genetic Engineering Before We Knew About Genes
- Author
- Hubbell, Sue
- Format/Binding
- Hardcover
- Book Condition
- Used - Very Good
- Jacket Condition
- Very Good
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Edition
- First Edition
- ISBN 10
- 0618040277
- ISBN 13
- 9780618040278
- Publisher
- Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- Place of Publication
- Boston/New York
- Date Published
- 2001-10-15
- Keywords
- genes genetic engineering
Terms of Sale
Out-of-the-Way Books
30 day return guarantee, with full refund including original shipping costs for up to 30 days after delivery if an item arrives misdescribed or damaged.
About the Seller
Out-of-the-Way Books
Biblio member since 2022
North Adams, Michigan
About Out-of-the-Way Books
Online home based business. Also sell at Book Fairs.
Glossary
Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:
- Tight
- Used to mean that the binding of a book has not been overly loosened by frequent use.
- Jacket
- Sometimes used as another term for dust jacket, a protective and often decorative wrapper, usually made of paper which wraps...
- First Edition
- In book collecting, the first edition is the earliest published form of a book. A book may have more than one first edition in...
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