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lightreadsShe Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity
4/5. Quick, everyone write your erudite yet personal doorstops on genetics! It's apparently what one does now. Luckily, there's a lot to say; this book has remarkably little to no overlap with Mukherjee's, which came out around the same time.
I read this over a . . . complicated few weeks in March while waiting to find out if my 2 in one hundred thousand diagnosis is the 1 in 1.25 million that is now treatable (it's not – don't say your sorry, it's based in ableist assumptions about what I was going to do with this information, and your ableist assumptions are quite possibly wrong) and also while waiting for the amnio results that would likely decide whether my pregnancy is ending in a live birth or not (baby is absolutely fine, exhale, it's okay).* So yeah, an interesting few weeks to be reading about the applications and misapplications of genetics.
It's a good book; less technical than mukherjee's in a lot of ways, and also a bit less philosophical, but with fascinating diversions into mosaicism and how we could probably wipe out mosquito-born malaria in a few years if it weren't so terrifying and possibly unethical. I do have to say that the author is pretty interested in his personal genome which, fair enough. But I've come to realize that listening to someone else talk about their genes is about as interesting as listening to someone else talk about their dreams. Which is to say, 90% of the time, it's of great significance to the speaker and absolutely none to anyone else in the world. Seriously, have you ever had to sit through someone recounting in excruciating detail what percentage of which part of their heritage comes from different parts of Europe? No one cares but you! In the 10% of really interesting discussions might be this fascinating story, which is of course interesting because it only starts with genetics but has to do with so much more.
*Oh yeah, that. Yeah. I'm due at the end of the summer. :D
4/5. Quick, everyone write your erudite yet personal doorstops on genetics! It's apparently what one does now. Luckily, there's a lot to say; this book has remarkably little to no overlap with Mukherjee's, which came out around the same time.
I read this over a . . . complicated few weeks in March while waiting to find out if my 2 in one hundred thousand diagnosis is the 1 in 1.25 million that is now treatable (it's not – don't say your sorry, it's based in ableist assumptions about what I was going to do with this information, and your ableist assumptions are quite possibly wrong) and also while waiting for the amnio results that would likely decide whether my pregnancy is ending in a live birth or not (baby is absolutely fine, exhale, it's okay).* So yeah, an interesting few weeks to be reading about the applications and misapplications of genetics.
It's a good book; less technical than mukherjee's in a lot of ways, and also a bit less philosophical, but with fascinating diversions into mosaicism and how we could probably wipe out mosquito-born malaria in a few years if it weren't so terrifying and possibly unethical. I do have to say that the author is pretty interested in his personal genome which, fair enough. But I've come to realize that listening to someone else talk about their genes is about as interesting as listening to someone else talk about their dreams. Which is to say, 90% of the time, it's of great significance to the speaker and absolutely none to anyone else in the world. Seriously, have you ever had to sit through someone recounting in excruciating detail what percentage of which part of their heritage comes from different parts of Europe? No one cares but you! In the 10% of really interesting discussions might be this fascinating story, which is of course interesting because it only starts with genetics but has to do with so much more.
*Oh yeah, that. Yeah. I'm due at the end of the summer. :D
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Date: 2019-03-31 12:46 am (UTC)My fondness for reading about genetics intersects in unhelpful ways with my disinclination to listening to my mother talk about family history.
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Date: 2019-03-31 12:53 am (UTC)Yes. One of my grandmothers was obsessed with family history, with a particular emphasis on genetics. I'll grant she did some interesting research -- a lot of this was early internet, so we're talking paper archives -- but I just. I do not care that my great great whatever married someone from a different island three hundred years ago, gasp.
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Date: 2019-03-31 02:36 pm (UTC)And... yeah... I apparently also think reading about genetics and applications and misapplications of same (although in my case fictional) is the thing to do when faced with personal genetics. But, heh, yeah, I'm not sure I would want to read an entire book about someone talking about his personal genome...