Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body

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This book is about the making of the human body. It is about the devices that enable a single cell buried in the obscure recesses of the womb to develop into an embryo, a foetus, an infant and finally an adult. It provides an answer provisional and incomplete, yet clear in outline, to the question: how do we come to be?

In part the answer to this question is readily apparent. Our bodies – I hesitate to add our minds – are the products of our genes. At least our genes contain the information, the instruction manual, that allows the cells of an embryo to make the various parts of our bodies. But this answer, so easily given, conceals a world about which we know very little. Genetics, to quote one popular writer on the subject, is a language. ‘It has a vocabulary – the genes themselves – a grammar, the way in which the inherited information is arranged, and a literature, the thousands of instructions needed to make a human being.’ Just so. What he failed to add is that the language of the genes is largely unintelligible.

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