Blood Matters: From BRCA1 to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene - Softcover

Gessen, Masha

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0156033313 ISBN 13: 9780156033312

Publisher: Mariner Books, 2009

Synopsis

Masha Gessen discovered through genetic testing that she had the dreaded BRCA1 genetic mutation--the same mutation made famous recently by Angelina Jolie, which predisposes women to ovarian and breast cancer. As Gessen wrestled with a wrenching personal decision—what to do with such knowledge—she explored the landscape of a brave new world, speaking with others like her and with experts including medical researchers, historians, and religious thinkers.

Blood Matters is a much-needed field guide to this unfamiliar and unsettling territory. It explores the way genetic information is shaping the decisions we make, not only about our physical and emotional health but about whom we marry, the children we bear, even the personality traits we long to have. And it helps us come to terms with the radical transformation that genetic information is engineering in our most basic sense of who we are and what we might become.

 

About this title

Book Description:

HMH hardcover, 2007, Previous ISBN 978-0-15-101362-3

From the Inside Flap:

In 2004 genetic testing revealed that Masha Gessen had a mutation that predisposed her to ovarian and breast cancer. The discovery initiated Gessen into a club of sorts: the small (but exponentially expanding) group of people in possession of a new and different way of knowing themselves through what is inscribed in the strands of their DNA. As she wrestled with a wrenching personal decision?what to do with such knowledge?Gessen investigated the landscape of this brave new world, speaking with others like her and with experts including medical researchers, historians, and religious thinkers.

Blood Matters is a much-needed field guide to this unfamiliar and unsettling territory. It explores the way genetic information is shaping the decisions we make, not only about our physical and emotional health but about whom we marry, the children we bear, even the personality traits we long to have. And it helps us come to terms with the radical transformation that genetic information is engineering in our most basic sense of who we are and what we might become.

About this edition

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0156033313
• ISBN 13: 9780156033312
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336