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Blood matters : from inherited illness to designer babies, how the world and I found ourselves in the future of the gene / Masha Gessen.

By: Material type: TextTextPublication details: Orlando : Harcourt, c2008.Edition: 1st edDescription: 321 p. ; 24 cmISBN:
  • 0151013624
  • 9780151013623
Subject(s):
Contents:
pt. 1. The past. My mother's fatal flaw -- The four mothers of Jews -- The post-Nazi Era -- pt. 2. The present. Indecision -- A decision at any cost -- The father of hereditary cancers -- The cruelest disease -- The science of matchmaking -- The operation -- pt. 3. The future. The future the old-fashioned way -- Biobabble -- What we fear most.
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Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library NonFiction 616.042 G392 Available 33111007153329
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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 explored 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.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [289]-307) and index.

pt. 1. The past. My mother's fatal flaw -- The four mothers of Jews -- The post-Nazi Era -- pt. 2. The present. Indecision -- A decision at any cost -- The father of hereditary cancers -- The cruelest disease -- The science of matchmaking -- The operation -- pt. 3. The future. The future the old-fashioned way -- Biobabble -- What we fear most.

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