Heredity: Our Intimate Mystery

For the past couple years, I've been chugging away on a book about heredity--its history and its future, what scientists have discovered about it and what it means to us all.

At last, I can share with you the cover of She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become. I wish I could say that this lovely image was my idea. But the jacket design is the work of Pete Garceau, and the art was created by Sandra Culliton. The book will arrive in bookstores May 29, 2018. But already my publisher is getting some endorsements. Ed Yong, staff writer at The Atlantic and author of I Contain Multitudes, has this to say:

"She Has Her Mother's Laugh is a masterpiece--a career-best work from one of the world's premier science writers, on a topic that literally touches every person on the planet." 

Even though the official publication date is months away, you can pre-order the book now. And I hope you do! Pre-ordering, you may be surprised to learn, is a huge boon to authors these days. It helps make a book more prominent on book-selling web sites, which in turn helps bring it to the attention of radio producers, reviewers, and others who can help spread the word even more. So I'd be incredibly grateful if you'd help build the momentum. Take your pick from these links (and share them with your friends!): Amazon, Barnes and Noble, IndieBound, or iBooks.

I was inspired to write this book because heredity is at once so familiar and so alien. It is something we all know about, and yet it also manages to keep us perpetually perplexed. What do we inherit from our ancestors, exactly? How does life's past shape its present? DNA is an important part of the answer, but we can't stop there. If we do, we fall prey to all sorts of fallacies. For example, it can come as a surprise to learn that if you go back nine or ten generations, you can find many ancestors from whom you inherit no DNA at all.

In She Has Her Mother's Laugh, I explore the history of this intimately mysterious concept--the shifting explanations as to why like engenders like. I trace the origins of our modern concept of heredity through long-running obsessions with breeding crops and livestock, with defining races of people to be persecuted and even enslaved, with searching for the causes of medical disorders that arise from within. I look at how twenty-first-century studies of genomes have shed light on the astonishing complexity by which heredity influences traits ranging from height to intelligence. And I show how genetic explorations of our ancestry challenge simplistic notions of our inherited identity.

In the book, I consider how we can expand our notion of heredity. It takes place not just between generations, but within our own bodies as well. You can trace a genealogy of the cells in your brain, for example. I also examine controversial arguments that heredity can take place beyond genes, carried across the generations through other channels such as culture or even microbes.

A broader understanding of heredity is vital for us to grapple with our new found power--thanks to tools like CRISPR--to alter heredity itself: to steer it on new courses or simply break its familiar rules.

I hope you find reading it as meaningful as I did writing it. For more information, visit bit.ly/SheHasHerMothersLaugh