Steven Rose

Nicholas Wade’s review of The Code of Codes (LRB, 20 August) reveals a misconception unfortunately too common among those captivated by the power apparently offered by molecular biology to explain life. ‘Nature,’ he informs us, ‘requires only five million pieces of information, the units being the base pairs strung along the chemical backbone of DNA, to specify a bacterium … 3000 million...

It is a great pity that Edward Said tarnishes his excellent article about the criminal folly of Desert Storm (LRB, 7 March) by mentioning the unsustainable claim that the gassing of the Kurdish civilian population of Halabjah in March 1988, in which some five to six thousand people died, was an Iranian rather than an Iraqi atrocity. This piece of disinformation was propagated by the Pentagon at a time...