It’s a familiar story. You pack that special book or magazine for the
long-haul flight. Then while browsing the airport bookstall you succumb to the
temptation of something completely different.
Athene Donald admits to having read a different book to the one she took on her last travels.
She exchanged a biography for a guide to the fast-paced world of genomics.
Donald, a condensed matter physicist at Cambridge University’s Cavendish
Laboratory, had intended to lose herself in Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life,
Georgina Ferry’s biography of the Nobel prizewinning crystallographer (Granta
Books, £9.99, ISBN 186207285X). She swapped it for Genomes, T.…
