DNA : The Marvellous Molecule product reviews

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.