The gene revolution

This is the remarkable 60 year story of the discovery of genes and traces the revolution in our understanding.

A tiny cluster of our 25,000 genes are disproportionately involved in defining who we are: how we fight disease, how our brains are wired and perhaps even how compatible we are with other people. This is the remarkable 60 year story of the discovery of these genes and traces the revolution in our understanding of our health, our relationships and our individuality.

There are around 25,000 human genes. We each have a similar set of these genes but those that vary the most from person to person are: our compatibility genes.

These few genes, argues Daniel M. Davis, influence which diseases we are susceptible and resistant to, whether our tissue and organs can be used in transplantation, what our chances of successful reproduction are, how our brains are wired, and perhaps even how compatible we are with one another.
In exploring the history of these genes' discovery, and the unfolding of their secrets, Daniel M. Davis seeks an answer to questions of how genetic compatibility affects our relationships, reproduction, medical research and ethics - and, looking to the future, considers the startling possibilities of what our knowledge of these genes might mean for you and me.

Geoff Maitland is Professor of Energy Engineering at Imperial College London, with a career that has straddled industry and academia.

He is a key member of the Clean Fossil and Bioenergy Research Group at Imperial, a diverse, world-class team leading research on the transition to a sustainable energy future.

The Higgs boson, as proposed within the Standard Model, is the simplest manifestation of the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism.

On 8 October 2013 the Nobel prize in physics was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider."

Professor Jordan Nash is an experimental particle physicist who has been involved in experiments at CERN for the last 25 years. He has also worked on experiments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California and the JPARC facility in Japan.

He leads the team preparing for future upgrades needed for high intensity operation of the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, and is currently collaborating on an experiment designed to look for rare interactions forbidden by the Standard Model of particle physics.

He was head of the High Energy Physics group at Imperial College from 2007-2014, and is currently the Head of the Physics Department at Imperial College.
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