• click here to return to the homepage •
or 
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.
The Tooth Fairy (Softcover)
Big Smoke
Discworld : Monstrous Regiment
Lizzie, love
Navigators - Killer Creatures
The Boy on the Page
Marvel: Captain America The Winter Soldier
3D Comic Sticker Book
How I Alienated my Grandma
Derek 'Danger' Dale #3: The Case of the Really Really Magnetic Magnet 
The 39 Clues Doublecross #3: Mission Hurricane
Bullseye Bella
E Oma, Rapeti - Po Marie. Run, Rabbit - GoodnightProduct reviews...
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.
Random listing from 'Books'...
The Gecko Annual features a dictionary of odd words that come in handy on car trips, a sophisticated "spot the similarity", a found poem from school newsletters, a maths-nerd's memoir full of tricky logic puzzles, comics that embrace other worlds, a very unlucky zebra, and top-class fiction that spans Christchurch Botanic Gardens in the 19th century, the loss of a brother, a Kiwi beach holiday, and a Fontanian boarding ... more...
All trademarks, images and copyrights on this site are owned by their respective companies.
KIWIreviews is an independent entity, part of the Knock Out News Group. This is a free public forum presenting user opinions on selected products, and as such the views expressed do not necessarily reflect the opinion of kiwireviews.nz and are protected under New Zealand law by the "Honest Opinion" clause of the Defamation Act of 1992. KIWIreviews accepts no liability for statements made on this site, on the premise that they have been submitted as the true and honest opinions of the individual posters. In most cases, prices and dates stated are approximate and should be considered as only guidelines.
"There's more to a person than the things they have done"
from 'Eastenders' TV show.
