The Book of Me, 2nd Edition (Autobiographical Journal)

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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. I ask if genomicists will ever be able to look at a person’s alleles and deduce something about his or her temperament. I have in mind the novelist’s territory, those mysterious components—warmth, spontaneity, humor—that, however uncomfortable it makes us to admit, seem to be somewhat to largely heritable. Will a genetic signature ever help us understand the origin of high-level behavioral traits? Church gazes off into the distance, with that look of pure experimental pleasure. “Well, I don’t think there’s a huge difference between high-level behavioral traits, low-level behavioral traits, and physical traits,” he says. “They’re all physical, in some sense.” Just like that, I slip into the era of personal genomics, the logical extension of the endless cloud of risk management we have been living under for some time. Now I know what risks I have been dealt, and if I don’t take appropriate actions to try to evade them, the onus is on me. But what actions? Yoo and Rienhoff step me through the charts, and I enter my very own war on terror, monitoring lots of ambiguous chatter that is impossible to understand without more context, that I can respond to only in qualified and indirect ways, that I can’t defeat, but that I can at best hold at bay—a standing low-grade condition of Orange Alert that demands perpetual increased surveillance.

The Book of Me by Rachel Kempster, Meg Leder, Paperback The Book of Me by Rachel Kempster, Meg Leder, Paperback

old cat Baxter put to sleep. There were times I felt so completely gut-sad that all I could manage to focus on was the rise and fall of my ribs as the breath came in and out. Genes can have many different viable variants, each one called an allele. When DNA replicates, small errors during copying can garble the bases in the sequence. For instance, a stretch of the myoglobin gene might be erroneously copied from 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. 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. Why, you may wonder, do I want to learn more about myself? Let me share a story about my own secret self...

Combining psychology, philosophy and sheer fun, The Book of Me is an introduction to the vital art of self-knowledge, showing how it can help us grow into calmer, wiser and more rounded human beings.

The Book of Myself (New edition): A Do-It-Yourself The Book of Myself (New edition): A Do-It-Yourself

I wonder out loud if personal genomics might ultimately force a single-payer system in this country; it’s hard to imagine how else society will be able to survive the definitive revelation of unequal, inherited risk. No one disagrees.

Oh no,” he says. “So much is already happening that it’s hard to imagine that some variation on all those things is not going to come true.” I reach the Fens, where I once lived with a woman whom I’d talked into moving to this city. We broke up, in part, over the children issue. Neither she nor I nor the man she married nor the woman I married have ever procreated. At least 25 percent of us is a full-edged Supporter of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. But I think of all the couples, in the years to come, who will study their own genomes out of concern over what they might hand down to their offspring. There will be those who demand (or even steal) a copy of their betrothed’s full sequence before signing the prenup. Contains hundreds of guided questions organized into sections about your past, present, and future, family history, and inner self.