Over the last few years I’ve had the privilege of working with some truly amazing scientists. There are too many to name here but special acknowledgements must go to Michelle Barton, Stephan Beck, Mark Bedford, Shelley Berger, Adrian Bird, Chris Boshoff, Sharon Dent, Didier Devys, Luciano Di Croce, Anne Ferguson-Smith, Jean-Pierre Issa, Peter Jones, Bob Kingston, Tony Kouzarides, Peter Laird, Jeannie Lee, Danesh Moazed, Steve McMahon, Wolf Reik, Ramin Shiekhattar, Irina Stancheva, Azim Surani, Laszlo Tora, Bryan Turner and Patrick Varga-Weisz.
Thanks go also to my former colleagues at CellCentric – Jonathan Best, Devanand Crease, Tim Fell, David Knowles, Neil Pegg, Thea Stanway and Will West.
As a first-time author I owe major gratitude to my agent, Andrew Lownie, for taking a risk on me and on this book.
Major thanks also to the lovely people at my publishers Icon, especially Simon Flynn, Najma Finlay, Andrew Furlow, Nick Halliday and Harry Scoble. Their unfailing patience with my complete ignorance of all aspects of publishing has been heroic.
I’ve had great support from family and friends and I hope they’ll forgive me for not mentioning them all by name. But for sheer entertainment and distraction during some stressy patches I have to thank Eleanor Flowerday, Willem Flowerday, Alex Gibbs, Ella Gibbs, Jessica Shayle O’Toole, Lili Sutton and Luke Sutton.
And for always resisting the temptation to roll her eyes every time I said, ‘I can’t meet friends/do the dishes/go away for the weekend because I’m working on my book’, I’ve got to thank my lovely partner Abi Reynolds. I promise I’ll take that ballroom dancing lesson now.