Heredity And Hope

Neither minimizing the difficulty of the choices that modern genetics has created for us nor fearing them, Cowan argues that we can improve the quality of our own lives and the lives of our children by using the modern science and technology of genetic screening responsibly.

Draws from the latest advances in medicine to debunk anti-aging myths and provide a holistic approach to restoring age faster, covering such topics as boosting metabolism, choosing hormone therapy, and increasing healthspan.

"In the early 1800s, a century before there was any concept of the gene, physicians in insane asylums began to record causes of madness in their admission books. Almost from the beginning, they pointed to heredity as the most important of these causes. As doctors and state officials steadily lost faith in the capacity of asylum care to stem the terrible increase of insanity, they began emphasizing the need to curb the reproduction of the insane. They became obsessed with identifying weak or tainted families and anticipating the outcomes of their marriages. Genetics in the Madhouse is the untold story of how the collection and sorting of hereditary data in mental hospitals, schools for 'feebleminded' children, and prisons gave rise to a new science of human heredity. In this compelling book, Theodore Porter draws on untapped archival evidence from across Europe and North America to bring to light the hidden history behind modern genetics. He looks at the institutional use of pedigree charts, censuses of mental illness, medical-social surveys, and other data techniques--innovative quantitative practices that were worked out in the madhouse long before the manipulation of DNA became possible in the lab. Porter argues that asylum doctors developed many of the ideologies and methods of what would come to be known as eugenics, and deepens our appreciation of the moral issues at stake in data work conducted on the border of subjectivity and science. A bold rethinking of asylum work, Genetics in the Madhouse shows how heredity was a human science as well as a medical and biological one"--Jacket.

The #1 NEW YORK TIMES Bestseller The basis for the PBS Ken Burns Documentary The Gene: An Intimate History Now includes an excerpt from Siddhartha Mukherjee’s new book Song of the Cell! From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies—a fascinating history of the gene and “a magisterial account of how human minds have laboriously, ingeniously picked apart what makes us tick” (Elle). “Sid Mukherjee has the uncanny ability to bring together science, history, and the future in a way that is understandable and riveting, guiding us through both time and the mystery of life itself.” —Ken Burns “Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee dazzled readers with his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies in 2010. That achievement was evidently just a warm-up for his virtuoso performance in The Gene: An Intimate History, in which he braids science, history, and memoir into an epic with all the range and biblical thunder of Paradise Lost” (The New York Times). In this biography Mukherjee brings to life the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices. “Mukherjee expresses abstract intellectual ideas through emotional stories…[and] swaddles his medical rigor with rhapsodic tenderness, surprising vulnerability, and occasional flashes of pure poetry” (The Washington Post). Throughout, the story of Mukherjee’s own family—with its tragic and bewildering history of mental illness—reminds us of the questions that hang over our ability to translate the science of genetics from the laboratory to the real world. In riveting and dramatic prose, he describes the centuries of research and experimentation—from Aristotle and Pythagoras to Mendel and Darwin, from Boveri and Morgan to Crick, Watson and Franklin, all the way through the revolutionary twenty-first century innovators who mapped the human genome. “A fascinating and often sobering history of how humans came to understand the roles of genes in making us who we are—and what our manipulation of those genes might mean for our future” (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel), The Gene is the revelatory and magisterial history of a scientific idea coming to life, the most crucial science of our time, intimately explained by a master. “The Gene is a book we all should read” (USA TODAY).

If you want to know more about the transgenic items on your dinner table, how barnyard animals are being cloned for pharmaceuticals and foods, how wild creatures from mosquitoes to endangered species are being genetically modified, or what genetic engineering holds for the future of medicine and the human species, you need to read this book."--Jacket.

The past two decades have witnessed a truly phenomenal growth and expansion in our knowledge of the principles and mechanisms of in heritance. :\iolecular and microbial genetics, for all purposes non-existent at the outset of this period, have developed and flourished to the extent of becoming major branches of genetics from which the most exciting and edifying concepts of gene function and structure have been derived. Similarly, man, heretofore a genetic curiosity, has become in his own right a genetic organism of first rank importance. It is, therefore, not without reason that accompanying the rapid proliferation of genetic knowledge, a parallel increase has occurred in the technical nomen clature and terminology special to the field of genetics and often special to specific branches of genetics. In preparing this glossary of ca. 2500 entries, we have attempted to compile and collate the terminology from seemingly unrelated, widely separated branches of genetics - classical and molecular; microbial and human; cytogenetics and population genetics. We have not been content merely to collect terms and definitions much as is found in a dictionary. Rather our aim has been to provide material suitable and usable both for students and research workers. Accordingly, depending upon our evaluation, some terms have simply been defined, others have been described at some length even to the extent of providing experi mental data.

How tiny variations in our personal DNA can determine how we look, how we behave, how we get sick, and how we get well. News stories report almost daily on the remarkable progress scientists are making in unraveling the genetic basis of disease and behavior. Meanwhile, new technologies are rapidly reducing the cost of reading someone's personal DNA (all six billion letters of it). Within the next ten years, hospitals may present parents with their newborn's complete DNA code along with her footprints and APGAR score. In Genetic Twists of Fate, distinguished geneticists Stanley Fields and Mark Johnston help us make sense of the genetic revolution that is upon us. Fields and Johnston tell real life stories that hinge on the inheritance of one tiny change rather than another in an individual's DNA: a mother wrongly accused of poisoning her young son when the true killer was a genetic disorder; the screen siren who could no longer remember her lines because of Alzheimer's disease; and the president who was treated with rat poison to prevent another heart attack. In an engaging and accessible style, Fields and Johnston explain what our personal DNA code is, how a few differences in its long list of DNA letters makes each of us unique, and how that code influences our appearance, our behavior, and our risk for such common diseases as diabetes or cancer.