Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the
World
and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene
Masha Gessen
Reviewed by Kathleen Garber
This was a very interesting read but it took me a while to get through
it and a week to write the review.
Put simply, it’s a book about genes and how we’ve gone from just
learning about them to using them to diagnosis illness before it shows
symptoms and how they are beginning to be used to conceive children
with certain characteristics.
The book starts out with a discussion of breast cancer and the
Ashkenazi BRC1 and BRC2 gene mutation. Women with one of these genes
have an incredibly heightened risk of developing breast and/or ovarian
cancer. The risk is so high, many chose to have preventative
mastectomies (removing the breasts) and/or oophorectomies (removing the
ovaries.) As I went through these first few chapters, I thought the
whole book would be just the story of the author’s journey while
dealing with the discovery of and decisions that go with her mutant
gene. The book is more than that though. It was the author’s experience
that pushed her towards researching the front lines of genetics.
The book touches on rare diseases, rare procedures and a place that
does genetic testing to all Jewish teenagers so that when the family
finds someone they believe to be a suitable mate to their teen, they
can call this place.They can then give the names of their teen and the
other teen
and they are told if they are okay from a genetic viewpoint. What this
means is if both have a gene for the same recessive disorder than their
resulting children could have the disease. As long as they don’t have
recessive genes for the same disorder they are told the match is okay.
This is a very interesting and controversial way to use genetics.
It took me long to read it because it’s one of those books where you
need at least some concentration so I couldn’t read it when my kid’s
were awake which really limited my reading time. It’s not that it was
dry or hard to digest. It is written beautifully; very easy to follow
when you have some silence.
I found a lot of the material very interesting. I’ve always been
interested in the basics of genetics, especially when it comes to
what’s inherited and what’s not and how what genes are passed on is
determined. However I’ve never really followed the whole stem-cell
debate nor the “designer babies” that are starting to be conceived and
born. I learned a lot from this book and I have found that I am even
more interested in genetics that I thought.
I recommend this book to anyone who fits into one or more of the
following: is an Ashkenazi Jew, who has a large incidence of a certain
disease in the family, who is interested in genetics, who has
considered trying to conceive a donor-matching sibling for their child,
who wants to be informed about where genetics is heading in the future
or who is concerned with the prevalence of inherited illnesses.