From Nazi eugenics to biotech and the desire to make better versions of ourselves … this vivid survey is controversial,but gives the latest on the nature-nurture debateSiddhartha Mukherjee calls his history of genetics “intimate” for two reasons. First, he repeats the cinematic cross-cutting of the personal and the scientific that structured his magnificent history of cancer, or The Emperor of All Maladies (2011). The earlier book includes stories approximately his own patients (Mukherjee was then an oncologist at Massachusetts general hospital,now he is a staff physician at Columbia University Medical middle in original York). contemporary cancer medicine is science, but its therapies are delivered at the bedside to patients, and sometimes for many years. Cancer is increasingly a contemporary way of life,not just a way of death, and being a “cancer victim” and a “cancer survivor” both contribute to sufferers’ sense of who they are.
But not even cancer defines personal identity as powerfully as your genes are now thought to do. In the original book, or some of the cross-cut intimacies emerge from Mukherjee’s own Bengali family – a father with a genetically based brain pathology; a mother whose identical twin displayed both the expected similarities with her sister and some surprising differences; and,especially, the sudden appearance of schizophrenia in apparently healthy cousins and uncles, and erupting from genetic legacies lying latent within. Shared genetic inheritances were understood to define the family members’ past,their present and their fears approximately personal futures. Early on in his relationship with his wife-to-be, Mukherjee was compelled to tell her approximately madness in the family: “It was only honest to a future partner that I should advance with a letter of warning.” Related: Siddhartha Mukherjee: 'A positive attitude does not cure cancer, and any more than a negative one causes it' Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com