Accessible "medical mysteries" solved through genetics
"The Genome Odyssey" provides an overview to a number of medical cases involving genetic disease; how the people in question went undiagnosed for a long period of time, or how they had longstanding issues that needed a better treatment/solution than what was available. There's a young man who suddenly died in bed, a baby who had seizures and couldn't produce tears, a teenaged girl with a genetic heart disease that caused her to go into cardiac arrest multiple times, just to name a few. The most critical advancement in being able to diagnose and solve these mysteries is genome sequencing.
It's written in a way that's accessible for the average person without much education in a STEM field, providing background information, context and history here and there. Euan Angus Ashley also adds quite a personal touch with his writing, and doesn't just relay the facts as they happened, making each story rather engaging. At points he goes off on little tangents on related topics to the case at hand, but I usually found these tangents interesting; for example, with the girl with the heart disease he goes into the history of how humans tried restarting hearts, going back to 1740.
One chapter I was most interested in getting to was "Superhumans," though it's less exciting than it sounds. By "superhumans" the author is referring to people with particularly rare forms of genetic mutation that increase their abilities in some way or another. So for example, Eero Mäntyranta, who had a mutated gene that increased his oxygen carrying capacity, which helped him win several Olympic medals for cross-country skiing. Ashley's closing thought on this chapter is that by understanding the genomes of "superhumans" they might be able to harness that information to help treat and defeat disease for anyone.
He covers so much more... In the last chapter there's even mention of SARS-CoV-2. I will say that some stories were less interesting than others, and I wasn't always in the mood to read more, but it was informative and enjoyable overall. 3.5/5
It's written in a way that's accessible for the average person without much education in a STEM field, providing background information, context and history here and there. Euan Angus Ashley also adds quite a personal touch with his writing, and doesn't just relay the facts as they happened, making each story rather engaging. At points he goes off on little tangents on related topics to the case at hand, but I usually found these tangents interesting; for example, with the girl with the heart disease he goes into the history of how humans tried restarting hearts, going back to 1740.
One chapter I was most interested in getting to was "Superhumans," though it's less exciting than it sounds. By "superhumans" the author is referring to people with particularly rare forms of genetic mutation that increase their abilities in some way or another. So for example, Eero Mäntyranta, who had a mutated gene that increased his oxygen carrying capacity, which helped him win several Olympic medals for cross-country skiing. Ashley's closing thought on this chapter is that by understanding the genomes of "superhumans" they might be able to harness that information to help treat and defeat disease for anyone.
He covers so much more... In the last chapter there's even mention of SARS-CoV-2. I will say that some stories were less interesting than others, and I wasn't always in the mood to read more, but it was informative and enjoyable overall. 3.5/5