Plucking The Red Canary off the shelf in a bookshop, you'd assume that you'd found a book about biotechnology. The subtitle touts the eponymous bird as "the first genetically engineered animal", and the dust jacket promises a narrative of "huge contemporary relevance" to "the exciting but controversial developments in genetic manipulation". But it's not about biotechnology at all. It is in fact a book about animal breeding of the traditional sort ― there's not a restriction enzyme, plasmid vector or polymerase chain reaction (PCR) machine in sight. Presumably the publicists' attempt to drum up interest in the book explains the strange disconnect between its outside and its inside: they've given The Red Canary showy but artificial plumage.
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