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Epigenetics: The Ultimate Mystery Of Inheritance (2011)

by Richard C. Francis(Favorite Author)

3.6 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0393070050 (ISBN13: 9780393070057)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

W. W. Norton & Company

review 1: Fantastic book written in a very accessible style, though not an easy read. Done for a lay audience with a basic science background. Now I feel I understand what epigenetics is. I didn't have a clear sense of that before. I was even able to hold my own in a discussion about epigenetics the other day. The book just scratches the surface but I finally have the foundation to go out and research it more.
review 2: I've read a good deal of the popular genetics stuff, and I've had a class in micro-biology, so I've had a pretty good base for this book. Even if I hadn't, though, I think this would be pretty accessible. I'm not a great judge of that, though. One of the biggest surprises in recent scientific history was finding out that humans do not have an excepti... moreonal genome. The stuff that makes humans human is very similar to what makes everything else whatever it is. Our genome isn't necessarily bigger or more complex than other creatures. By and large, that is really good news, because it means that a wider range of other creatures are good laboratory proxies for humans -- from fruit flies to (very unfortunately) other great apes. Epigenetics is part of the explanation for how a genome can be a (relatively) unspectacular as ours and yet produce spectacularly different beings. DNA are the letters in which the recipe of the genome is written, but there's more to it. Other chemical factors -- factors which can and are modified by experience -- moderate the function of DNA, such that two people with precisely the same genome can result in radically different phenotypic and behavioral expressions of that genome. In other words, identical twins may sometimes be very different from one another despite having the same DNA, because the factors that regulate how the DNA is transcribed can vary based on experience. Having a stressed out mother can cause permanent changes in how genes are expressed in the mother's children, for example. Most of the other popular works involving genetics, from books on cancer to books on evolutionary psychology, do not address the role of non-genetic factors (epigenetics) in the expression of genes. As such, this is a good addition to your library if you are interested in those subjects. less

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