Food Safety: Old Habits, New Perspectives

960 Emerging Infectious Diseases • www.cdc.gov/eid • Vol. 13, No. 6, June 2007 of the evidence for and against these hypotheses, which remain speculative, is evenhanded and up-to-date. His accounts of the human and social effects of epidemic diseases and the origins of public health are full of lively anecdotes and colorful detail. Interspersed throughout are personal asides, clinical pearls, and lengthy tutorials on basic science topics, such as DNA replication and gene splicing. Although this book is far more information dense than are popular books for the lay public, its many shortcomings in terms of organization, depth, and documentation (including surprisingly few references) diminish its value to scholarly readers. More than anything else, it resembles an intellectually inspired but somewhat disorganized professor’s medical school lecture, which would probably be more fun to hear in person than to read. Meanwhile, those who are interested in a 21st-century account of the battle of the genomes may want to wait. Rapid advances in genomic science and technology are opening the way to better understanding of biology, evolution, and medicine, but the full integration of these disciplines is still at a relatively early stage. The idea that genes of 1 species can infl uence whole ecosystems, described by Richard Dawkins in 1982 as the “extended phenotype” (2), is only now giving rise to new perspectives on community genetics (3).