If Richard Lewontin is right, we're in for a big letdown when the Human Genome Project is completed. The promise used to justify the $3 billion effort is that the 3 billion base pairs in human DNA make up a "Book of Life" that will reveal the secrets of development, disease and everything in between. But as Lewontin points out in It Ain't Necessarily So-a collection of nine extended pieces from The New York Review of Books-there are a few troublesome details scientists "forgot" to mention when they were lobbying for the project more than a decade ago.

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