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

From the Back Cover:

Having inherited a heightened risk for cancer, a journalist travels to the frontlines of genetics and finds both personal guidance and a fascinating new world of scientific discovery

 

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR BLOOD MATTERS

"Blood Matters is beautifully written--and that is the least of its charms. Masha Gessen's new book takes its readers from the leading edge of modern genetic medicine through the hardest, grittiest kind of daily, personal experience, questions literally of life and death. Ultimately, Gessen gently, unflinchingly confronts the hard choices that come from our deepening knowledge of our genetic selves. The story she tells has versions encoded in every human being alive--which means that she has written both a marvelous read and an important book."--Thomas Levenson, author of Einstein in Berlin

About the Author:

MASHA GESSEN is a journalist who has written for Slate, Seed, the New Republic, the New York Times, and other publications, and is the author of numerous books, including The Future is History, which has been nominated for the National Book Award.

About this edition

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0156033313
• ISBN 13: 9780156033312
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 328