She Has Her Mother’s Laugh

Name: She Has Her Mother’s Laugh
Author: Carl Zimmer
ISBN: 9781509818556

Carl Zimmer

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She Has Her Mother’s Laugh

Carl Zimmer

awards won

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She Has Her Mother's Laugh was 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. 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 heredity is explored through historical and current scientific research, personal experience, and original reporting. 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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