Yoo and Rienhoff are expert in their reading. They remind me that my future is less a question of which particular alleles I have than of how my combinations of genes interact with the sum of all my environments. Should I take my Alzheimer’s risks any more seriously than I do my susceptibility to obesity? What about my epigenome—the complex meta-system of gene regulation just now beginning to be researched? How can I tell when, where, or how often my given genes will be expressed? Figuring that will require much deeper, harder, and more subtle acts of reading—something like the difference between sounding out the word w-a-t-e-r and knowing what the word means. From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Giver of Stars and the forthcoming Someone Else’s Shoes, discover the love story that captured over 20 million hearts in Me Before You, After You, and Still Me. The idea of contributing to a vast, wiki-like public library of genetic research greatly appealed to me. But I couldn’t quite imagine putting my comprehensive genetic data—data that also belonged to my whole family—online. I could see how ordinary all this will one day become, how declaring whether you had the version of the APOE gene that correlates with late-onset Alzheimer’s might one day become as normal as slapping a pub shot up on your blog or discussing your Zoloft dosage at a dinner party. I just couldn’t bring myself to become one of the first dozen people to inhabit the place.

In the technique, the short fragments of prepared DNA are primed on each end and read simultaneously from both directions: two reads for the price of one. That means five passes across my entire sequence will yield the accuracy of ten reads, equaling or sometimes even exceeding the accuracy of the human reference genome. I’ll be the first commercial subject to be sequenced with the method. My Google Earth map has just become a good deal crisper and more reliable across the board, and commercial sequencing has just halved in cost, once again. I lean against the unusually white wall, studying her as she frowns at me, her lips still parted around the shape of a word she seems to have forgotten.

Denouement

To express a possessive you can say "my X" or you can say "X of mine". The two constructions mean pretty much the same thing. No, "of mine" is not archaic, it's routinely used. But it is far less common than the "my X" form. She holds on to her frown for a moment longer than is honest, her eyes narrowing in a show of frustration that is pure fraud. She compounds this farce by clutching an article of clothing to her chest, feigning modesty. Children love to explore, born with a boundless desire to understand the world around them. While most of the outside world has already been mapped, there's a whole other world that has yet to be discovered, one that's accessible only to them: their own minds.

All of our upcoming public events and our St Pancras building tours are going ahead. Read our latest blog post about planned events for more information. We drive through an area of my old beloved Cambridge that has been transformed beyond recognition by a billion-dollar MIT construction program. Buildings from playful to sinister, many by prestige architects, spring up on every wedge of available land while cranes hoist up more of them by the month. The boom is fueled by a biotech industry that has yet to come near to fulfilling its much hyped promise. There seems to be no end of money that might be made from the molecularization of human health.Jorge Conde is a poised, business-casual man in his early thirties who insists on holding doors open for me. He finds us a quiet table where we can talk shop. He tells me about going from a childhood in Miami, the son of a Peruvian doctor father and Cuban mother, to a biology degree at Johns Hopkins and a Harvard MBA. He has worked in every aspect of the biotech business, including as an investment banker for Morgan Stanley. He likes the word actionable, as in “Most of what you will learn from sequencing your genome will be probabilistic and not actionable.” I have nothing but a small notebook and a broken pen and the numbers in my head to keep me company. 1 window. 4 walls. 144 square feet of space. 26 letters in an alphabet I haven’t spoken in 264 days of isolation. From the New York Times bestselling author of The Giver of Stars and the forthcoming Someone Else’s Shoes, discover the love story that captured over 20 million hearts in Me Before You,After You, and Still Me.