Pierre Tardivel, a French Canadian geneticist, works on identifying junk DNA for the Human Genome Project. At risk for contracting Huntington's chorea, Tardivel drives himself to succeed in a race against time to complete his research. Skillfully interwoven is the misidentification of John Demjanjuk as the Treblinka death camp's Ivan the Terrible, the cloning of Neanderthal genes, and a greedy insurance company that illegally and clandestinely takes DNA samples from its policy owners and kills high-risk clients before it has to pay out large claims.

"A Tom Doherty Associates book."