On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 2:04 PM Thaths <tha...@gmail.com> wrote: > The books that I enjoyed reading > <https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/646599?shelf=read> the most this > year: > > * The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer > <http://www.amazon.com/dp/1439170916/> by Siddhartha Mukherjee. An > excellent exploration of the history of cancer treatments and mankind's > experience with the malady. >
Mukerjee was just on the New Yorker radio hour talking about a new book of his that is coming out soon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1476733503/ The Gene: An Intimate History "Mukherjee opens with a survey of how the gene first came to be conceptualized and understood, taking us through the thoughts of Aristotle, Darwin, Mendel, Thomas Morgan, and others; he finishes the section with a look at the case of Carrie Buck (to whom the book is dedicated), who eventually was sterilized in 1927 in a famous American eugenics case. Carrie Buck’s sterilization comes as a warning that informs the rest of the book. This is what can happen when we start tinkering with this most personal science and misunderstand the ethical implications of those tinkerings. Through the rest of The Gene, Mukherjee clearly and skillfully illustrates how the science has grown so much more advanced and complicated since the 1920s—we are developing the capacity to directly manipulate the human genome—and how the ethical questions have also grown much more complicated. We could ask for no wiser, more fascinating and talented writer to guide us into the future of our human heredity than Siddhartha Mukherjee"
