Stephen Heywood was twenty-nine years old when he learned that he was dying of ALS - Lou Gehrig's disease. Almost overnight his older brother, Jamie, turned himself into a genetic engineer in a quixotic race to cure the incurable. His Brother's Keeper is a powerful account of their story, as they travel together to the edge of medicine.
The book brings home for all of us the hopes and fears of the new biology. In this dramatic and suspenseful narrative, Jonathan Weiner gives us a remarkable portrait of science and medicine today. We learn about gene therapy, stem cells, brain vaccines, and other novel treatments for such nerve-death diseases as ALS, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's - diseases that afflict millions, and touch the lives of many more.
"The Heywoods' story taught me many things about the nature of healing in the new millennium," Weiner writes. "They also taught me about what has not changed since the time of the ancients and may never change as long as there are human beings - about what Lucretius calls 'the ever-living wound of love.'"
This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more."synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Jonathan Weiner is one of the most distinguished popular-science writers in the country: his books have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, Time, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Scientific American, Smithsonian, and many other newspapers and magazines, and he is a former editor at The Sciences. His books include The Beak of the Finch; Time, Love, Memory; and His Brother's Keeper. He lives in New York, where he teaches science writing at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.
Jonathan Weiner is a Pulitzer prize-winning science writer whose previous subjects have been biologists intellectually obsessed with finches and fruit flies. Jamie Heywood, the central figure in Weiner's superb new book, is also obsessed -- but what drives Jamie is love and a "maddening hope." When his younger brother develops ALS, the dream of engineering and delivering a cure to save Stephen becomes the organizing principle of Jamie's life. The hubris of his quest is all the more breathtaking because he is not a scientist, but a charismatic young entrepreneur watching from the sidelines at an especially optimistic moment in scientific history.
Even as weakness creeps up and down Stephen's limbs, possible genetic fixes are being cobbled together and readied for testing in dozens of diseases. Jamie asks, Why not for Stephen? If Stephen Heywood had fallen ill a decade earlier, reputable doctors and researchers would have summarily dismissed Jamie's scheme to devise an experimental gene therapy for ALS and try it on his brother. But in the late 1990s, several highly regarded scientists and physicians listen and agree to become acrobats in his high-wire act.
In His Brother's Keeper, the biology of nerve cells and the dawning history of gene therapy play supporting roles in a plot as finely crafted as that of the best novels. Weiner uses the Heywoods' story to illuminate the unexpected ways in which a serious illness reveals character and shifts the balance within a family. Stephen Heywood is both brave and enigmatic: The center of a storm, he manages to downplay the terrifying reality of his disease while staying solidly connected with those he loves. The Heywood parents, John and Peggy, lend financial and emotional support to Jamie's headlong campaign but seem to remain clear-eyed, without false hopes. Jamie's wife, Melinda, and Stephen's fiancée, Wendy, give voice, aloud and in their journal scribblings, to the fear, guilt and anger of which the Heywoods themselves never speak.
But it is Jamie who fascinates. He draws the reader into Weiner's tale the way he drew scientists onto his team -- and drew Weiner himself into his family and into his obsession. Jamie's brilliance and energy are at first dazzling, then unsettling. The longer Weiner follows the story, the more ambiguous Jamie's motives appear, and the more bizarre seems his wish to inject a virtually untested treatment into his brother's nervous system. Meanwhile, the nation's early optimism about gene therapy is dashed by the death of a teenager in a medical experiment in Philadelphia, the same city where Jamie's scientific collaborators have been busily engineering genes to treat Stephen's ALS.
Weiner has a master's eye for the telling detail and a spare, often poetic style. His terse recounting of the seminal advances and setbacks in genetic engineering in the late 1990s provides the scientific counterpoint to the Heywood family drama. His Brother's Keeper could be considered the third volume of a trilogy that began with The Beak of the Finch, Weiner's chronicle of biologists watching bird evolution in the Galapagos, and continued with Time, Love, Memory, his probing of the genetic basis of behavior. In this book he brings the biology home, asking whether the revolution in our understanding of genetics can and should be harnessed at will to save a brother or to create a child.
The larger question is whether we will be able to use what we are learning to make us more fully human, or whether our new knowledge and power will obstruct that journey. "I wanted what I had seen and felt when I was small to have some connection with what I would see, learn and know in the end," Weiner writes. "I thought the whole human race wanted something like that. The beginning, middle and end should make one unbroken story. The stem should lead up to the rim of a cup from which we can drink and still be ourselves."
Reviewed by Susan Okie
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
Shipping:
FREE
Within U.S.A.
Book Description Soft Cover. Condition: new. Seller Inventory # 9780060010089
Book Description Condition: New. Seller Inventory # 3232492-n
Book Description Paperback or Softback. Condition: New. His Brother's Keeper: One Family's Journey to the Edge of Medicine 0.72. Book. Seller Inventory # BBS-9780060010089
Book Description Condition: New. Brand New. Seller Inventory # 0060010088
Book Description Condition: New. Brand New! Not Overstocks or Low Quality Book Club Editions! Direct From the Publisher! We're not a giant, faceless warehouse organization! We're a small town bookstore that loves books and loves it's customers! Buy from Lakeside Books!. Seller Inventory # OTF-S-9780060010089
Book Description Condition: New. Book is in NEW condition. Seller Inventory # 0060010088-2-1
Book Description Condition: New. New! This book is in the same immaculate condition as when it was published. Seller Inventory # 353-0060010088-new
Book Description Condition: New. Seller Inventory # ABLIING23Feb2215580001207
Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Stephen Heywood was twenty-nine years old when he learned that he was dying of ALS -- Lou Gehrig's disease. Almost overnight his older brother, Jamie, turned himself into a genetic engineer in a quixotic race to cure the incurable. His Brother's Keeper is a powerful account of their story, as they travel together to the edge of medicine.The book brings home for all of us the hopes and fears of the new biology. In this dramatic and suspenseful narrative, Jonathan Weiner gives us a remarkable portrait of science and medicine today. We learn about gene therapy, stem cells, brain vaccines, and other novel treatments for such nerve-death diseases as ALS, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's -- diseases that afflict millions, and touch the lives of many more."The Heywoods' story taught me many things about the nature of healing in the new millennium," Weiner writes. "They also taught me about what has not changed since the time of the ancients and may never change as long as there are human beings -- about what Lucretius calls 'the ever-living wound of love.'"This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Beak of the Finch" comes a book about the new biology and how it touches a defiant family-in-crisis fighting an incurable disease. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780060010089
Book Description Condition: New. Seller Inventory # I-9780060010089