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    Unavailable
    She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity
    Unavailable
    She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity
    Unavailable
    She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity
    Audiobook20 hours

    She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity

    Written by Carl Zimmer

    Narrated by Joe Ochman

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Award-winning, celebrated New York Times columnist and science writer Carl Zimmer presents a history of our understanding of heredity in this sweeping, resonating overview of a force that shaped human society—a force set to shape our future even more radically.

    She Has Her Mother's Laugh presents a profoundly original perspective on what we pass along from generation to generation. Charles Darwin played a crucial part in turning heredity into a scientific question, and yet he failed spectacularly to answer it. The birth of genetics in the early 1900s seemed to do precisely that. Gradually, people translated their old notions about heredity into a language of genes. As the technology for studying genes became cheaper, millions of people ordered genetic tests to link themselves to missing parents, to distant ancestors, to ethnic identities...

    But, Zimmer writes, "Each of us carries an amalgam of fragments of DNA, stitched together from some of our many ancestors. Each piece has its own ancestry, traveling a different path back through human history. A particular fragment may sometimes be cause for worry, but most of our DNA influences who we are—our appearance, our height, our penchants—in inconceivably subtle ways." Heredity isn't just about genes that pass from parent to child. Heredity continues within our own bodies, as a single cell gives rise to trillions of cells that make up our bodies. We say we inherit genes from our ancestors—using a word that once referred to kingdoms and estates—but we inherit other things that matter as much or more to our lives, from microbes to technologies we use to make life more comfortable. We need a new definition of what heredity is and, through Carl Zimmer's lucid exposition and storytelling, this resounding tour de force delivers it.

    Weaving historical and current scientific research, his own experience with his two daughters, and the kind of original reporting expected of one of the world's best science journalists, Zimmer ultimately unpacks urgent bioethical quandaries arising from new biomedical technologies, but also long-standing presumptions about who we really are and what we can pass on to future generations.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMay 29, 2018
    ISBN9780525594178
    Unavailable
    She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity
    Author

    Carl Zimmer

    Carl Zimmer, author of At the Water's Edge, is a frequent contributor to Discover, National Geographic, Natural History, Nature, and Science. He is a winner of the Everett Clark Award for science journalism and the American Institute of Biological Sciences Media Award. A John S. Guggenheim Fellow, he has also received the Pan-American Health Organization Award for Excellence in International Health Reporting and the American Institute of Biological Sciences Media Award. His previous books include Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, Parasite Rex, and At the Water's Edge. He lives in Guilford, Connecticut.

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    Reviews for She Has Her Mother's Laugh

    4.5/5

    26 ratings8 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This was a fascinating read about genetics and inheritance (not just biology) and the history of heredity. Well-written, it kept me turning the pages. The most fascinating chapters for me were on mosaics and chimeras. It was fascinating to read how some of us may be chimeras (the biological but rare reason reason why people can be born intersex) and not know it, being genetically comprised of our unborn twin or as a woman, taking on the genetics of an unborn child. Fascinating and scary to learn how mosaic cells (including cancer) can transfer from organism to organism in the case of Tasmanian Devils and dogs and even humans.
    • 5/5
      MIND-BLOWING !! A masterpiece , still astonished by what i can get from such reading .
    • 5/5
      Superb science writing. All about heredity, genetics, etc. I read a lot about this stuff, so much in the book was familiar already - but a lot was brand new to me also. Great discussions about social implications including some of the best writing about the long and complex history of eugenics that I’ve ever read.
    • 5/5
      Very readable, despite covering some chewy topics. The wonders of the mechanisms of inheritance in all of its forms made somewhat clearer in these pages.
    • 5/5
      Quite well done. The writing is clear and engaging about a complex subject.
    • 4/5
      Carl Zimmer creates a very readable history of the good and bad uses of genetics and heredity. He offers compelling prose woven from the odyssey of genetic scientists who have brought us to the brink of genetic engineering. It is all very different than you might expect. Darwin gave us an elegant theory of evolution without ever understanding the genetics who admitted: “The laws governing inheritance, are quite unknown.” Darwin's speculation about Pangenesis, turned out to be spectacularly wrong. It is disturbing to learn that genetic theories were used for several centuries by scientists, social sciences, scholars and politicians to justify a genteel racism and really frightening eugenics. Poised as we are on the brink of a genetic engineering revolution Zimmer is giving us a stern warning about misuse of this new power.
    • 4/5
      When people meet my children I often hear comments along the lines of; he is just like you, your daughter reminds me so much of your wife and similar comments. And it is true, their genetic inheritance comes directly from me and my wife and the blend of our genes has made three very different and unique children. What gets passed on and how is the subject of this weighty tome.

      In this very researched book, Zimmer takes us back through our genetic history to show how these fragments make up our very being. Of the trillions of cells in our bodies, those that contain our DNA make us who we are, what we look like, how our health will be and countless other factors. But there is more to it than that, our genetic code is not the only thing passed from mother to child, echoes of past event from our father and his parents can be seen in the code, we get our first immune system via the placenta and the various microbes that ensure that we can live as passed on too.

      There is a fascinating chapter on Chimeras – these are people who carry more than one set of DNA. This was never thought to be possible, but after various anomalies including where a mother was witnessed giving birth to a child, the DNA test said that it wasn’t her child. The investigation into it discovered how DNA can transfer between non-identical twins after one dies in the womb. A mother can even absorb some of the DNA from the child she is carrying.

      There is a wealth of information and details in this substantial, but still a very readable book. Not only does he consider where we have got to in our understanding on DNA, but he contemplates the future of inheritance and what heredity will mean in years to come. Even though I never did biology while at school, Zimmer manages to make this fairly substantial tome a straightforward book for readers like me.
    • 5/5
      A thorough, and thoroughly interesting book on genetics and heredity. In this case, the book is as good as it's cover art (which is fantastic).