New blood
Okay so maybe it’s not so new since the book’s been out for several months…Anyway, my review of Masha Gessen’s Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene, appears in the current issue of Nature Genetics (subscription only, sorry!):
Throughout this remarkable hybrid of a book—part memoir, part science journalism, part narrative nonfiction—Gessen demonstrates both her independence and her willingness to tweak dogma, whether it comes from guilt-ridden postmodernists or didactic medical professionals. Her sometimes conflicting goals are to discover what is possible for herself as a breast cancer ‘previvor’ and to quench her reporter’s compulsion to document and understand the genetic landscape as it shifts beneath her feet.
I work as an Assistant Professor in the Duke University Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy (although this site and its content are my own).
In 2007 I became the fourth subject in Harvard geneticist George Church's Personal Genome Project. As the PGP moves forward, I am chronicling the dawn of personal genomics, that is, people obtaining their genomic information for whatever reason(s) and figuring out what to do with it. I am interested in the relevant technologies and especially the attendant privacy and other ethical/legal/social issues.
This blog may also discuss some of my non-genome interests or, to paraphrase Dwight Yoakam, "Guitars, Cadillacs, hillbilly music, etc etc."
The header image comes from the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange's multimedia performance piece, "Ferocious Beauty: Genome."
August 28th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
Hi–
That quote sounds wonderful–thank you. Any chance you could e-mail me the entire review?
Thank you,
Masha