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Home > Categories > Books > Activities / Crafts > DNA : The Marvellous Molecule review
Its place in the story of life and evolution explained by means of models to cut out and glue together.
Just as it is hard to describe a spiral staircase without using your hands, so it is difficult to understand the double helix without a three-dimensional model. This one is easy to glue together and makes a fine mobile.
There are also other models which shed light on nucleotides, viruses and protein synthesis. Included also is a minibook which links together the models with lots of interesting information about the role that DNA plays in genetics and in the evolution of life.
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Review by: tucker (Karl)
Dated: 17th of August, 2004
When Watson and Crick first published their theory on the structure of DNA, human science was still in the hands of the educated elite. Today, school kids learn more by the time they hit highschool than most adults knew by the time they died, back then.
And so, such nifty publications as this are readily available in your nearest bookstore, instead of stacked in huge shelving units in a university library. Makes you wonder what is stored in Uni libraries these days, huh.
This book is a seriously important educational resource, but is also a great summer-holiday arts-n-crafts book too. It gives you the entire DNA story, including all the other molecules that make DNA work. You can't get DNA to replicate without the help of Ribosomes, tRNA, and the amino acid building blocks... all of which are clearly and accurately described in the handy minibook that comes as part of this.
It even contains a build-it-yourself storage box, a quick reference card, a set of ACGT connection blocks that illustrate how the amino acid base pairs in DNA link up.
My only TINY gripe was the artwork was obviously hand-coloured originally. Perhaps the artwork would have been a little less fuzzy if it was created from scratch in a good illustration program such as Freehand or Illustrator.
Overall, this is a very serious book with a fun twist. My 4 year old son had a lot of fun helping daddy make the funny twisty ladder thing (the model of a DNA double helix) and the jigsaw blocks (Amino Acid pairing blocks). I was quite impressed.
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