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    The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance
    The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance
    The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance
    Audiobook11 hours

    The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance

    Written by Nessa Carey

    Narrated by Donna Postel

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Epigenetics can potentially revolutionize our understanding of the structure and behavior of biological life on Earth. It explains why mapping an organism's genetic code is not enough to determine how it develops or acts and shows how nurture combines with nature to engineer biological diversity. Surveying the twenty-year history of the field while also highlighting its latest findings and innovations, this volume provides a readily understandable introduction to the foundations of epigenetics.

    Nessa Carey, a leading epigenetics researcher, connects the field's arguments to such diverse phenomena as how ants and queen bees control their colonies; why tortoiseshell cats are always female; why some plants need cold weather before they can flower; and how our bodies age and develop disease. Reaching beyond biology, epigenetics now informs work on drug addiction, the long-term effects of famine, and the physical and psychological consequences of childhood trauma. Carey concludes with a discussion of the future directions for this research and its ability to improve human health and well-being.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMay 23, 2017
    ISBN9781541474031
    The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance
    Author

    Nessa Carey

    Nessa Carey worked in the biotech and pharma industry for thirteen years and is a Visiting Professor at Imperial College London. Her previous books for Icon are The Epigenetics Revolution (2011), described by The Guardian as ‘a book that would have had Darwin swooning’, and Junk DNA (2015), ‘a cutting-edge guide to the ever-more mysterious genome’ (New Scientist).

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    Reviews for The Epigenetics Revolution

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    • 4/5
      Epigenetics has been a fascinating idea for me for years. I must've been about sixteen or seventeen, and there was a program on it on TV. And until the marks of my biology AS level came back, I was determined to become a geneticist and work on this kind of thing. Then I got a B in biology but shocked my teachers by getting full marks on more than one module of English Lit (a thing they didn't think possible for one module, let alone three), so my fate was sealed. But the interest remained.So, unsurprisingly, I found this book fascinating. I think I was most interested in the chapter on how the epigenome might be implicated in mental illness, and how epigenetic changes might explain issues such as neglected children growing up to be more susceptible to depression than the average. I wonder whether epigenetics has something to do with the fact that PTSD can be passed from parent to child: obviously, to some extent a paranoid parent with PTSD is going to treat a child in ways that may themselves be traumatic, but there could be some epigenetic factor in their cells making them more susceptible to PTSD.Obviously this is still a very young field, and much isn't known. Carey manages to present all of this information in a pretty easy-to-digest way, and makes it clear what is speculative, what only applies to animal trials, etc. For me, with a prior interest but little scientific training, it swung oddly at times between being pitched for someone with less knowledge than me and being pitched for someone clearly already familiar with a lot of the names being mentioned. For the most part, though, even parts that made my eyes glaze over with dizzying amounts of information were possible to follow if I just concentrated.
    • 5/5
      Fantastic book. Author gives a lot of common analogies when describing how genes and epigenetic‘s work. The book highlights the amazing achievements in genetics but also makes you understand that there is so much more research needed to be done in this field.
    • 4/5
      After learning about how parents' and grandparents' experiences can have an effect on the present generation because of the affect on a person's genes, I became very interesting in learning more about this. The science behind the turning on or repressing of genes is called epigenetics. I wanted to find out more and one of the books that I read on the subject is "The Epigenetics Revolution". It had stories like the lingering affects of the Danish Hunger Winter and other known events that can be tracked forward to find out the effects on later generations. It also had a lot more scientific explanations; so scientific that there were chemical diagrams included. I was expecting the book to be more about the written theory but understand a bit more about how the mechanisms of epigentics operate now.It was good, but sometimes hard to grasp.
    • 3/5
      2017:I have rated this at 3 stars--but that is more a reflection of my ability to understand the material than it is of the book. Towards the end I began to have an outline of what this book discusses. I will allow it to lie fallow in my brain for a while, and pick it up again next year.
    • 3/5
      Really dense with tons of names, but very informative if you can make it through.