Writing the book on life itself

Since copies of this month’s book, Beyond Inheritance, are starting to arrive with subscribers, I wanted to take a moment to chat a little more about why I picked it—and without spoiling the content very much.

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Personally I find genetics one of the more difficult sciences to fully grasp. Yes, physics and mathematics have their weird branches and theoretical divisions, and I am by no means competent in any of them… but they are also full of numbers and calculations that have a logic that matches my brain: there are right answers and wrong ones, an ever-expanding family of algorithms and equations that largely make sense. 

Life sciences, though? They have all these fuzzy edges and unseen variables, terribly messy. There are mostly-correct answers and mostly-incorrect ones, but also our theories seem influenced by so many unexplored factors: the environmental, the inherited, the behavioral, and more.

But I also know that the thing I find hard about genetics is also what makes it exciting. There is still so much to learn! 

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That squishy area is what Beyond Inheritance gets into. Unlike the strain of pop science writing which really favor pure narrative over explaining the science, Khamsi’s book deliberately and unapologetically gets into the weeds. Sometimes it can take a while to follow the acronyms or medical names, or track a specific chromosomal detail or remember the impact that turning a particular gene on or off can have. But keep going and you get rewarded, expanding your mind and your viewpoint as a result.

It’s incredible, really, how our understanding of biology has moved over the years. Heredity was obviously something that people understood to some degree throughout history (two red-headed parents might have red-headed kids, for example) but in less than 200 years we have gone from the theories of Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel to being able to spot the complex mosaic of genetic mutations that underpin this book.

When Darwin came off The Beagle in 1838 and eventually worked through On The Origin Of Species (1859) he did not really have an answer for the specific mechanisms—as David Quammen wrote, he had ”no viable theory of heredity”—but it wasn’t long before Mendel arrived with an answer of sorts. His pea plant experiments showed that certain traits were passed on from one generation to another, and gave us the idea of dominant and recessive traits which formed the basic understanding of genetic inheritance that I think most of us hold.

From there, Miescher first isolated DNA (which he called “nuclein”) in 1869, even if he didn’t really understand what it was. In the 1920s, 30s and 40s, the chemical makeup was slowly unveiled; the double helix was found in 1953. What a leap forward in less than a century.

But Khamsi’s book shows how far we have come from that landmark in less than 75 years. Genome sequencing now allows us to map all manner of avenues that were previously unseen, to try to find out the properties of each set of chemicals; we have gone so far as to map the entire human genome—all 3,000,000,000 characters of it.

As I read the book, I wondered how much space my own genome would take if you printed it out. The answer was at least 260,000 pages of text, or roughly 820 books the size of Beyond Inheritance: a small library for a single person. (In fact, that’s what they did at the Wellcome Collection in London: 175 volumes of printed material used to capture a whole human sequence in paper form.)

Making a map this size means that we don’t just understand a few traits now, but thousands of them. But as this book points out, we’re now realizing that my genome isn’t just subtly different from your genome; it is different from itself. My genome changes inside my body, from cell to cell, from location to location, from organ to organ. It changes over time as well, whether from outside influences and the things we eat, drink, and experience, or simply from age—the statistical randomness of a copy machine on overdrive.

This is the key perspective shift that Khamsi achieves, showing this vast and dizzying scale of genetic code. It’s so unfathomably large, full of so many complex connections and interactions, that the fact we can wrestle any of it into submission is really a miracle. And the implications?

Isn’t it thrilling that in this short timespan we’ve gone from having the most basic, crude knowledge of genetics to being able to think about incredibly specific, personally-tailored genomic treatments that could address or even cure incredibly rare conditions? That we now are on the verge of being able to interrogate our own bodies to discover crucial secrets about our health and our future?

That shift, that promise, was one thing that riveted me when reading Beyond Inheritance—and why I think people should read this book!

Onwards

Bobbie