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 debate
Siddhartha 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, The Emperor of All Maladies (2011). The earlier book includes stories about his own patients (Mukherjee was then an oncologist at Massachusetts general hospital, now he is a staff physician at Columbia University Medical Center in New York). Modern cancer medicine is science, but its therapies are delivered at the bedside to patients, sometimes for many years. Cancer is increasingly a modern 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 new book, 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, erupting from genetic legacies lying latent within. Shared genetic inheritances were understood to define the family members’ past, their present and their fears about personal futures. Early on in his relationship with his wife-to-be, Mukherjee was compelled to tell her about madness in the family: “It was only fair to a future partner that I should come with a letter of warning.”
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