his manuscript on 28 September 1961. The novelisation was closer to the original 30-minute scripts and had much of the material required to pad each episode to 45 minutes removed. Promoting it as the story that would "out-Quatermass Quatermass", the book was published by Souvenir in February 1962. Weekly Science Diary said, "It is a brightly written, really exciting tale with the added inducement of scientific accuracy". It has since been translated into several languages. There have also been two alternative versions; the first – issued by Macmillan in 1964 – rewritten by Elliot in simpler English as a study aid for English language students and the second a children's version published in 1969. A major theme of the novel is that information for generating new life can be transmitted by radio signal over galactic distances. Hoyle and Elliot published the novel A for Andromeda in 1962 at a time when the fundamental importance of the biological information encoded in DNA was just starting to be understood. The fictional biochemist in the novel, Professor Dawnay, was able to create life forms, initially a bacterial form and later a human female, using what is referred to in the novel as a “D.N.A. synthesizer” and the DNA sequence information transmitted from the Andromeda Galaxy. In the real world of today, whole genomes can actually be built from chemically synthesized DNA sequences, and when inserted into a receptive cellular environment can be brought to life to create a novel organism (see for example Hutchinson et al.). Thus the fictional syntheses of life forms described in the novel anticipated what, today, is starting to be realized. In other media Several film studios, including MGM, the Associated British Picture Corporation and Hammer Films, made enquiries regarding the film rights to A for Andromeda. However, no film version was ever made. In 2006, BBC Worldwide released a DVD box set, The Andromeda Anthology, comprising the original A for Andromeda and its sequel The Andromeda Breakthrough. A for Andromeda was reconstructed using tele-snaps with on-screen captions to describe the plot set to a soundtrack of music from the serial. The surviving film sequences were placed in the narrative where appropriate and the surviving episode "The Face of the Tiger" was presented in its entirety. Extra features included a commentary on the surviving material by Michael Hayes, Peter Halliday and Frank Windsor; a specially made making-of documentary, Andromeda