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

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Yet the dream of molecular management notwithstanding, we are unthinkably far away from ever being able to control the story.

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

After dinner, on my walk back up the hill to the hotel, I wonder if we are prepared to live so intimately with our genetic risks and trait dispositions, whether we’re really ready to send our inheritance oating out so promiscuously for interpretation in the burgeoning informational space of genetic discovery. If a standard 250-page book comprises about 500,000 letters, you would need 12,000 such books to publish an individual genome.Since 1957, GQ has inspired men to look sharper and live smarter with its unparalleled coverage of style, culture, and beyond.

The Book of Me, 2nd Edition - Google Books

As for the perils of looking into his own future, Kucherlapati himself is quite ready, “even as an older person,” to have his complete genome sequenced. I’m seated at a small conference table surrounded by Conde, Kiirikki, Yoo, Kucherlapati, Church, and Hugh Young Rienhoff Jr. Craig Venter, and an anonymous Chinese scientist—had had their essentially complete diploid genomes sequenced. And more markets will follow, in the settling of the place: reprogenetics, germline engineering, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, gene manipulation… We’ve cracked open the door of imageneation, and the whole variant spectrum of human ingenuity and insanity, quackery and productive creativity, is rushing out. My heart-disease risks are considerably grimmer, although family history already told me that long ago.For instance, a sequence of several hundred bases on chromosome 22 make up the gene that codes for the protein myoglobin, the oxygen-carrying pigment of muscle tissue. While most of the outside world has already been mapped, there's a whole other world that has yet to be discovered, one that's accessible only to them: their own minds. AFTER MY BRIEFING, Conde and I head to an Afghani restaurant for dinner with Raju Kucherlapati, distinguished geneticist, professor, and scientific director of the Harvard Partners Center for Genetics and Genomics. We’ll once again change our relations to chance and choice—another evolution in human consciousness that we’ll feel only for a short time, before it too goes normal.

The Book of Me | The British Library The Book of Me | The British Library

There’s a rush to declare it either hype or hope, to appraise the various new companies, to pass judgment on the luxury genome or recreational genotyping, to see the future and give it a green light or red ag. I wonder out loud if personal genomics might ultimately force a single-payer system in this country; it’s hard to imagine how else society will be able to survive the definitive revelation of unequal, inherited risk.It’s the latest expression of an ancient obsession, one favored by natural selection and coded by our genes. Knowing a person’s genes, Kucherlapati hopes, will help turn drug prescription into something much more evidence-based, narrowly targeted, and exact, greatly improving outcomes and reducing side effects. This keepsake volume contains hundreds of guided questions organized into sections about your past, present, and future, family history, and inner self. My hotel stands seventy-five yards from Bulfinch’s State House and is even closer to the Granary Burying Ground, with its Founding Fathers buried shoulder to shoulder. 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 Book of Me | The School of Life The Book of Me | The School of Life

For a short time, the most commonplace of living details—a slug coiled up in the bottom of the recycle bin, the tip of a fiddlehead fern poking up through last fall’s leaf mass, the smell of hyacinth, the beautiful laugh lines on the rims of my wife’s eyes, the mutant, Schoenbergian tone row of a deviant white-throated sparrow desperate to attract a mate—seem like utterly incomprehensible, infinitely unlikely odds violations: bioinformatics run amok. They could identify some alleles—variations of particular genes—and tell me a little bit about the risks, predispositions, and susceptibilities I had inherited. Our genetic variants will become data queries, our haplotypes a kind of Facebook account for new kinds of special-interest networking, our personal set of alleles a new source of digitally updated identity.An engaging guided journal for developing children’s understanding of themselves and their emotions. But he concedes that all of recent health care has been pushing toward a fuller engagement of the patient in risk assessment and treatment evaluation. He’s not particularly concerned about the majority of dire information that sequencing might reveal—all the predispositions about which medicine can as yet do nothing. Even this more abbreviated readout would take months to complete, require the efforts of dozens of people, and produce a volume hundreds of thousands of pages long whose intricate networks of interacting chemical protagonists hinted at dramatic interactions beyond anyone’s ability to interpret, let alone follow.