Mutants: On Genetic Variety And The Human Body (2005) - Plot & Excerpts
Life is beautiful, but the process of creating life involves variation and some of those variations have horrified and fascinated people through history. This book alternates historical with contemporary understanding of mutants, to powerful effect. A book purely of ancient misconceptions (heh) of science gets dull quickly. A book purely of how we understand biology to work also gets dull quickly. The author's explanation of historical understanding, and the elegant science writing makes this book much easier to read than it could have been.The science writing makes its subject fascinating: the ballet dance of cells, the chemical flows of choreography, the cause-and-effect of markers, signals, and receptors. The historical accounts of scientific investigation into mutants from 1600s-modern times uncovers our mixed feelings towards mutants, the unpleasant treatment of people by scientists/anatomists, and the giant opaque fog of ignorance through which which we shine the weak lamp of science and claim understanding.Some notes:* Deformity taken as mark of divine displeasure* "Des monstres" by Ambroise Pare in 1500s marks first earthly (non-supernatural) cause of deformity (pregnant woman looking at something ugly, theory of maternal impressions).* teratology = science of monsters* Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or enquiries into the very many received tenents and commonly presumed truths (1646) by Sir Thomas Browne, the mythbusters of his day: that the feathers of a dead kingfisher always indicate which way the wind is blowing, that the legs of badgers are shorter on one side than another, etc.* William Harvey in 1642 was allowed to dissect deer the king had shot, so saw progress month by month of deer embryos. "I saw long since a foetus, the magnitude of a peascod cut out of the uterus of a doe, which was complete in all its members & I showed this pretty spectacle to our late King and Queen. It did swim, trim and perfect, in such a kind of white, most transparent and crystalline moysture (as if it had been treasured up in some most clear glassie receptacle) about the bignesse of a pigeon's egge, and was invested with its proper coat." Author of this book says: "The King apparently followed Harvey's investigations with great interest, and it is a poignant thought that when Charles I was executed, England lost a monarch with a taste for experimental embryology, a thing not likely to occur again soon."* William Harvey's "De generatione animalium" (1651) cover showed Zeus holding egg, egg with slogan "Ex Ovo Omnia" (from the egg, all).* "mutations alter the meaning of genes"* "each new embryo has about a hundred new mutations that its parents did not have ... about four will alter the meaning of genes by changing amino acid sequence of proteins, three of which will be harmful"* Ritta and Christina Parodi, conjoined twins. Parents prevented by Parisian authorities from exhibiting the girl(s), had to live in poverty, died at eight months. Body then heavily contested, eventually dissected in the big amphitheatre of Museum of Natural History. Made reputations.* "Australian Aborigines inscribed a memorial to a dicephalus (two heads one body) conjoined twin on a rock that lies near what are now the outskirts of Sydney." (1300BC)* "In a Kentish parish, loaves of bread in the shape of two women locked together side by side are distributed to the por every Easter Monday, a tradition, it is said, that dates from around the time of the Norman conquest and that commemorates a bequest made by a pair of conjoined twins who once lived there."* la querelle des monstres -- the quarrel of the monsters -- was over explanations for deformations: was it God's beautiful mysterious work, or were they accidents? "If bodies were clocks, then there seemed to be a lot of clocks around that were hardly to the Clockmaker's credit". Preformationism (egg holds entire embryo writ small, containing its own eggs which contain ...) vs epigenesis (order emerges spontaneously after fertilisation).* Sir Thomas Browne called the womb "the obscure world"* conjoined twins feature inverted organs in the twin: heart on the right, etc. 1 in 8500 infants are born without a twin but with their organs inverted. Most famous was "an old soldier who died at Les Invalides in 1688. Obscure in life -- just one of the thousands who, at the command of Louis XIV, had marched across Flanders, besieged Valenciennes and crossed the Rhine to chasten German princelings -- he achieved fame in his death when surgeons opened his chest and found his heart on the right. In the 1600s Parisians wrote doggerel about him; in the 1700s he featured in the quarelle des monstres debate; in the 1800s he became an example of 'developmental arrest', the fashionable theory of the day. Were he to appear on an autopsy slab today, he would hardly be famous, but would simply be diagnosed as having a congenital disorder called 'Kartagener's syndrome'."* Kartaganer's people are sterile and with poor sense of smell: cilia and sperm are driven by molecular motors that don't function because one of their proteins is encoded by a gene that is affected in Kartagener's.I'm not up to page 60 and I'm abandoning this note taking. The book is fascinating, the writing is gently evocative, clear, and engaging. [update on finishing]The book is exquisitely crafted: evocative writing and elegant construction. By alternating between the outlandish history (where it's okay to marvel at freaks, as our predecessors did), and the contemporary science (so beautifully described as to make us marvel at the details of miracle of life without feeling, as with so many biological science fact books, that there's so many details and so few principles that it's all dispassionate stamp-collecting), Lerois has created that rare thing: science writing that is both good science and good writing.
Near the end of this book the author pulls out the quote per molto variare la natur e bella--Nature's beauty is its variety--and it could be a motto for the book itself. Given that most of the book is about the human body developing dramatic abnormalities, usually during development, beauty is an odd word. I found some accounts difficult to read. But the ability for human biology to survive and sometimes prosper in so many different forms was just amazinga.The book is a discussion of various conditions that have very visible effects--dwarfism, giantism, Siamese twins, people with no hands or feet, people with hands and feet but no arms and legs, people covered with more hair than Chewbacca, and so on. Some are fatal at birth, some at a young age, but most are not. A surprising (to me) number of people founded lines still prospering today--so a Chinese sailor missing the top his skull and clavicles founded a line that has several hundred descendants with the same symptoms.If the existence of a whole family sharing such an unusual trait makes you wonder if scientists can do some sort of genetic analysis and figure something out about how genes interact with the body, well, answering that is the book's main concern. (Spoiler alert: Yes.) Most of the discussion is on gene expression and signalling pathways, in more detail than I expected. I'd call it roughly a Scientific American level of discussion. I'm not well qualified to judge the scientific soundness but in the small number of cases I knew anything at all Leroi seems to have done a good job presenting both conclusions and uncertainty.The title--presumably picked by the publisher--is misleading though, as many problems are teratogenic or even nutritional and hove nothing to do with genetics. (Thalidomide and iodine deficiency induced issues, for example.) I don't begrudge "Mutant" for eye catching value but throwing in "genetic" in the subhead continues the annoying trend in popular science writing of implying everything biological is genetic.
What do You think about Mutants: On Genetic Variety And The Human Body (2005)?
The subject of this book cannot help but be interesting, and it has enough real science to actually feel as though you're going in depth into the topic of genetic anomalies. At a certain point, though, the voice slipped from that of a narrator leading the reader through interesting historical individuals and their accompanying genetics differences--such as conjoined twins and gigantism--into something more akin to a curious scientist dabbling in anthropology. By the end he's wondering whether, despite the obvious and acknowledged social and culture dangers of investigating the genetics of race, it would be worth satisfying our curiosity about it after all? I found myself feeling vaguely uncomfortable at certain points; his complete bafflement at the fact that a male pseudohermaphrodite would be attracted to women despite being raised as a girl would have been charming were it not so ignorant as to basic understandings of sexual attraction. He talked about male pattern baldness and cures for it, but never talked about female hirsutism except to mention that men don't find it attractive. He discussed red hair in the context of how attractive redheaded women are. His discussion of the history of the clitorus took place entirely out of the actual social context of the medical establishment's history of suppression and denial of women's sexuality. I don't know if I was being overly sensitive or just dealing with yet another male author unaware of his sexist world view and lack of familiarity with modern ideas about sexuality and gender. 2003 was not that long ago.Overall, an interesting and educational book, but I don't really like the author very much.
—Megan
This has to be one of the most boring books I've read in a long time.I'm fascinated by mutations, evolution, DNA etc, and even spent last semester cutting and making recombinant DNA, but this book just bored me to tears.For people just looking for a 'freakshow' or whatever, look elsewhere, this book is not full of pictures, and isn't geared towards that type of crowd anyways, it's geared towards people (like myself) who are fascinated with how DNA works, and how errors in DNA can happen through translation and transcoding.This book is also full of very technical terms, that not everybody is going to understand, so if you haven't take some Biology courses, you're going to need to start googling some of the terms.
—Cj
All my life, I have groaned inside (and sometimes outside) whenever someone spoke about the "miracle" of giving birth. How miraculous is it, I would ask cynically (and overly confident of my cleverness), if flies and jellyfish do it? In fact, it's only one of the most basic functions living organisms perform, along with eating and pooping. After reading this book, however, and learning about so many things that can happen during gestation that will render the fetus unviable, I am truly amazed, first, that organisms are born with such basic similarities to other members of their species and, second, that they are born at all. I must admit that reproduction is, indeed, miraculous. Don't get me wrong, my horror at pregnancy has not lessened, especially after reading about the coat of hair fetuses grow at five months and then shed a few weeks later. (And I thought defecating while trying to push the fetus out was horrifying!)Read more . . .
—Rebecca
