The Book of Me, 2nd Edition (Autobiographical Journal)

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Ten volunteers had already signed up to sequence most of the regions of the genome known to have especially high medical or functional significance. I try out various scenarios on him: personally tailored drugs, in vitro trait selection, even trans-human genetic enhancement. I imagine all the new identity crimes that cheap whole-genome scans invite—genetic blackmail, forgery, even framing someone at the scene of a crime.

The Book of Myself (New edition): A Do-It-Yourself The Book of Myself (New edition): A Do-It-Yourself

Will the day ever come when the probabilistic nature of genetic prediction will sharpen into something more definitive? He’s curious to see, for instance, whether a person who learns he has several specific genes that predispose him to lung cancer might finally be motivated to quit smoking. An engaging guided journal for developing children’s understanding of themselves and their emotions. As with most technologies, somebody manages to eke out a living raising alarms, and I think that’s good. I feel strangely shaky after that announcement, realizing what a different article this would have been if I had.That’s proactive medicine: For better or worse, the days of the unassailable doctor-priests are over.

The Book of Me - Leder, Meg; Kempster, Rachel 9781492641940: The Book of Me - Leder, Meg; Kempster, Rachel

What the sequence certainly will not tell me is anything about who I am, where I’m going, or how I got from childhood—let alone my young adulthood in the Boston Fens, head filled with the wildest of fictional books—to a man of 50 in a cab on Boylston Street, about to be told the sum total of the code that I was born with and that will take me on into the grave. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Among the most visible of new genotyping services was 23andMe, with their slogan “Genetics just got personal.He’s referring to a single study that associates a longer version of the DRD4 gene on chromosome 11, involved in the brain’s dopamine system, with people who need higher levels of stimulation. I have in mind the novelist’s territory, those mysterious components—warmth, spontaneity, humor—that, however uncomfortable it makes us to admit, seem to be somewhat to largely heritable. My heart-disease risks are considerably grimmer, although family history already told me that long ago. Well, I don’t think there’s a huge difference between high-level behavioral traits, low-level behavioral traits, and physical traits,” he says.

The Book of Me | The School of Life The Book of Me | The School of Life

In fact, I have hundreds of genetic variants that impact my risks for all kinds of conditions: age-related macular degeneration, Alzheimer’s, asthma, atopic dermatitis, atopy, autism…and that’s not even all the _a’_s. And of course, The Magic Mountain, whose hero, convinced that the newly discovered X-rays are a glimpse inside people’s souls, carries around an X-ray photograph of his beloved as a kind of erotic fetish.

By being among the first individuals in history to have their whole genome sequenced, these participants will help pioneer the emerging field of personal genomics. Most hunters and gatherers, he argues, would never have been able to wrap their heads around the concept of a supermarket.