Synopsis
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2018 BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION
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, award-winning science writer Carl Zimmer argues, 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 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 together 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.
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Reviews
“She Has Her Mother's Laugh is a masterpiece – a career-best work from one of the world's premier science writers, on a topic that literally touches every person on the planet.”Ed Yong, author of I Contain Multitudes
“Zimmer is a born story-teller. Or is he an inherited story-teller? The inspiring and heartbreaking stories in She Has Her Mother's Laugh build a fundamentally new perspective on what previous generations have delivered to us, and what we can pass along. An outstanding book and great accomplishment.”Daniel Levitin, author of This is Your Brain on Music and The Organized Mind
“She Has Her Mother’s Laugh is at once far-ranging, imaginative, and totally relevant. Carl Zimmer makes the complex science of heredity read like a novel, and explains why the subject has been–and always will be–so vexed.”Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Pulitzer Prize winner The Sixth Extinction
“She Has Her Mother’s Laugh is a superb guide to a subject that is only becoming more important. Along the way, it explains some remarkably complicated science with equally remarkable clarity–a totally impressive job all around.”Charles C. Mann, author of New York Times bestseller 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
