Tears of the Cheetah: And Other Tales from the Genetic Frontier. (Nonfiction).(Book Review)(Brief Article)

STEPHEN J. O'BRIEN. St. Martin's, $25.95 (304p) ISBN 0-312-27286-3

The 14 firsthand evolutionary yarns collected here are the equivalent of genomic Aesop's fables. By turns passionate, understated, unexpectedly literate and historically astute, O'Brien, head of the National Institutes of Health's Laboratory of Genomic Diversity, is a breath of fresh air: he's written a genetics book that neither probes the ambiguous legacy of genetic engineering nor seeks to entice us with yet another last-word account of the race to map the human genome--and judiciously dispensing with jargon wherever possible, O'Brien's a smooth read as well. The author does not tell us the genetic …