She Has Her Mother's Laugh: the powers, perversions, and potential of heredity by Carl Zimmer

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.

657 pages. (May 2018)

Check availability

Book Page from BookBrowse.

Reading Club Selection Guide & Discussion Questions from the National Network of Libraries of Medicine

 

To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)

 

She Has Her Mother's Laugh at goodreads

 

Review from National Review

Review from The New York Times

Review from Publishers Weekly

Author Website

Book Trailer:

This title is available for download as an eBook and as an eAudioBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.

Title Read-alikes: The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee; The Tangled Tree by David Quammen; DNA by James D. Watson; Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin; The Invisible History of the Human Race by Christine Kenneally; A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford; The Story of the Human Body by Daniel Lieberman; Herding Hemingway's Cats by Kat Arney; The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil; We Know It When We See It by Richard Masland; Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich; I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong; and Some Assembly Required by Neil Shubin.