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Nessa Carey

Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease and Inheritance Paperback – January 1, 2012

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Epigenetics Revolution

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Publication date

January 1, 2012
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6.02 x 0.88 x 9.21 inches
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9781848313477
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Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 1848313470
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Icon Books; Reprint edition (January 1, 2012)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9781848313477
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1848313477
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.02 x 0.88 x 9.21 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #924,304 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #265 in Cell Biology (Books)
- #398 in Molecular Biology (Books)
- #531 in Microbiology (Books)

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918 ratings

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Nessa Carey
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Nessa Carey
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Nessa Carey has a virology PhD from the University of Edinburgh and is a former Senior Lecturer in Molecular Biology at Imperial College, London. She has worked in the biotech and pharmaceutical industry for ten years. She lives in Bedfordshire and this is her first book.
And what else?
After leaving school I went to the University of Edinburgh to become a vet. This didn't last because I was allergic to fur, unable to think in 3D (not good for anatomy), quite bored and really rubbish at the course. So I dropped out and at Catford Job Centre, in amongst the ads for short order chefs (I couldn't cook) and van drivers (I couldn't drive), was one for a forensic scientist. And oddly enough I had always wanted to work at this end of crime - I must have been the only kid in the UK who had read a biography of Bernard Spilsbury by the age of 11.
So for five years I worked at the Metropolitan Police Forensic Science Lab in London and studied part-time. I then realised that I loved academic science and went off to do a PhD. At the University of Edinburgh. In the veterinary faculty.
After that, it was the academic route of post-doc, Lecturer and Senior Lecturer. But I had a tendency to wander off on routes that intrigued me - degree in Immunology, PhD in Virology, post-doc in Human Genetics, academic position in Molecular Biology. Such wandering isn't necessarily the best idea in academia but the breadth of experience is really valued in industry. I've spent 10 years in biotech and have recently moved to the pharmaceutical sector.
And outside of work? I love birdwatching (no, I don't have a life-list), cycling, scavenging stuff from skips, and growing vegetables. I have a fantasy about one day having a smallholding (where I will starve to death if I really have to be self-sufficient) and I can't wait to write my next book. And I can now cook. And drive.
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BattleBornMom

Overall, an excellent read.

Reviewed in the United States on June 12, 2018

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If you are looking for a comprehensive introduction to the science of epigentics, this will serve you well. It was a relatively easy and enjoyable read.

The criticism of its intended audience being unclear is fair. At times, it seems to be aimed at a rather lay audience with slightly odd analogies that over simplify almost to a fault. A few pages later, jargon and technicalities are tossed around that definitely require a solid background in biology to follow with any ease. This has the discordant effect of making the simplistic analogies seem even more odd. It can’t seem to decide if it expects you to remember only basic high school biology or if it prefers you’ve had at least a couple of undergraduate level courses in molecular biology and genetics.

That being said, it was incredibly helpful in updating my understanding of this field. As a biology major in the ‘90s, this field was so nascent that it was barely addressed, let alone studied thoroughly. As a teacher of AP Bio in high school today, I needed an update on vertebrate gene regulation in order to be able to competently address the topic in my classroom. This book provided exactly that. While I won’t be teaching most of the advanced details in this book, I will be adjusting a few critical things to ensure alignment with today’s knowledge.

Even better, it reminded me why I have always found genetics so fascinating. It’s even more so now than it was 25 years ago. As so often happens in emerging fields, each intriguing answer leads to dozens more questions. If you think the way a basic prokaryotic operon works is pretty cool, learning about mammalian epigenetic gene regulation will make your brain geek out with intellectual joy.

56 people found this helpful

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OUTSTANDING, WITH EXCEPTIONS

Reviewed in the United States on November 12, 2018

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This is an outstanding introduction to the rapidly advancing field of epigenetics, which is of profound importance for evolutionary biology, trait inheritance and gene therapy endeavors. The author excels in making the very complex understandable; and her personal comments on main researches add a human dimension.
Lacking is discourse on possible misuses of epigenetic insights and perhaps some speculations on the uses of epigenetics for steering the future of human evolution. But these are not really essential in this book, though I would love to know the views of the author.
Disturbing is a rather narrow epistemology of science. It is not true that science must avoid domains “where it is impossible to develop the testable hypotheses that are the cornerstone of all scientific enquiry” (p.235) , Leaving aside the social sciences, large parts of astronomy, evolutionary psychology and also the science of evolution are far from fully satisfying this requirement. Abduction, as proposed by Charles Sanders Peirce in his work on the logic of science and expanded later, is ignored. The proposed mechanistic models ignore quantum mechanics. And, to conclude this list of disturbing statements, I wonder how the author would elaborate her statement “A phenomenon can have a mechanistic basis, without being deterministic” (p. 235) at a workshop on free will attended by philosophers of the mind and brain scientists.
The main part of the book on epigenetics deserves five stars and is strongly recommended. I choose to ignore superfluous statements irrelevant for the core contents and suggest that readers do so too.
Professor Yehezkel Dror

20 people found this helpful

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Jennifer

Great introduction to epigenetics

Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2017

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This is my first book on Epigenetics and it’s fascinating how different situations, actions, or experiences in our lives can affect our cells. Events that happened to our parents, grandparents, and so forth can also affect our cells in ways science is just starting to understand. I liked how Nessa Carey laid out the book. She starts with a history and some examples of epigenetics. She then discusses cells and how they work and how epigenetics is contributing to understanding diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s. She looks at why identical twins are not truly identical at the cellular level and how psychological trauma at an early age can affect us. She finishes the book with what we can expect to see in the future from the field of Epigenetics.

I learned a lot from this book and want to learn more about this topic. I did find it difficult to stay engaged, partly because of Carey’s abundant use of adverbs, and partly because I’m not well versed in biology. Maybe if I had a better basic understanding before going in – it’s been a long time since I took a college biology course – it would’ve been more engaging for me. Overall a great introduction to the field.

32 people found this helpful

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Herbert Gintis

Challenging, well written, authoritative

Reviewed in the United States on August 5, 2015

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This is a fine introduction to the topic by an extremely knowledgeable researcher. Carey tries to make it all very accessible to the novice, but in fact it presupposes a fair amount of understanding of molecular biology, especially of how DNA and RNA work, and at least a rudimentary understanding of protein folding and heredity.
I felt there was too great an emphasis on epigenetic causes of human diseases, about which fairly little is known (except for a few rare but well-explored cases). Therefore, I only skimmed the last few chapters.
I read this book and also took a Coursera online course in epigenetics, but I still have no clear idea about the relationship between genetics and epigenetics as applied to inheritance patterns. I cannot imagine how to add epigenetic dynamics to the biological models I work with, or if they make any difference at all to population biology.

28 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Good on principles, light on molecules

Reviewed in the United States on December 28, 2014

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Very nicely written layman level intro to Epigenetics. Great analogies, good exposition, good emphasis about explaining why discoveries are important are unexpected.

Read it as an informal textbook to an academic class in Epigenetics. Probably got 33% of all the learning from the book and 67% from the class, and I have a suspicion the the basic lessons of the book will stick more than the forest of class details about what protein acetylates what unit of the histone.

Would possibly be nice to expose a little more of the molecular detail, without frightening horses and small children.

27 people found this helpful

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autodidact

A Good Description of Cutting Edge Science

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 21, 2018

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Understanding of the way the genetic code is used to create the foetus and maintain the body has extended considerably over the past decades. The genes are now regarded more as a toolkit for producing proteins than a blueprint. This book examines the process by which the original strand of DNA in the single cell becomes modified to produce the specialised cells in different parts of the body (why you don't have teeth in your eyes to use the rather disturbing example the author uses). It also demonstrates how the environmental effects can be passed on from parent to child. So this is a fascinating description for the general reader of what is cutting edge science. Not all of this is easy. Concentration is required to follow the processes involved. But no specialist knowledge is required. Well worth reading.

15 people found this helpful

Lindosland

Fascinating, but she jumps to conclusions too readily

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 9, 2015

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This is a great book for anyone who like me, is trying to make sense of what is really going on in the genome, in that it brings together many facts from research papers. I've given it five stars for this reason, and despite my many criticisms below, because it tackles an incredibly complex subject in an understandable and fascinating way. The criticisms come from my intense prior involvement in the subject, and are challenges to some of the ideas which I hope might help other readers. The book fails to put over the central story regarding the big question, "what is going on in the genome and to what ends?" I say this because the reader is led to believe that epigenetics explains many things that could not be explained before, such as how cells acquire their individual identity and retain it over decades. Methylation, we are told here, has been said to be virtually irreversible, so it fits the bill, but as we are later told the effects of methylation can be undone by further addition. Notable for their absence are the terms 'transcription factor', and ''genetic cascade' (they are not even in the index), though they are the bedrock of genetic theory; complex books have been written explaining cell fate and development in these terms, and we have no reason to dump the existing theory. A gene can make a protein which is a transcription factor, which can turn off another gene, and there is no reason why that gene cannot go on doing that in a cell and it's copies, through various mechanisms, ad infinitum - no need for methylation to suppress the gene. We should really be asking what methylation adds to the existing processes. It may be 'belt and braces', or it may be, as I think, much more complex than that.

Again, later in the book, it is suggested that the permanence of methylation makes it the ideal candidate as the cause of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder). Only after this idea has been developed in detail is it stated that memory may also be epigenetically determined. Memory, of course, is a far bigger subject than PTSD, and a very complicated one in which the growth of both new connections and new synapses (and possibly glial cells) has long been recognised as a perfectly good explanation of how neurons build and strengthen association. These processes may indeed be under control of epigenetics, but epigenetics isn't necessary for an explanation - again transcription factor cascades, or just the fact that synapses remain once they have been induced to form by neural firing are sufficient. PTSD undoubtedly arises out of memory; and especially emotional memory which appears to get separated from other memories, but memory is a much more complex process than can just be put down to epigenetics. I'm not saying that epigenetics isn't important - I think it's hugely important; just that Carey tends to jump to conclusions in a less than thorough way.

There is much mention of 'mental illness' in the book, again with methylation implicated especially in the 'diseases' of PTSD and 'depression'. While the author does a great, and much needed job of explaining how paradigm shifts can take a long time in science because of inertia in the system which resists the overthrow of established ideas, she is clearly unaware of the paradigm shift that has long been underway in the field of so called 'mental illness', especially in the UK, where DSM (the Diagnostic Statistical Manual) has long been viewed with disdain by many psychiatrists, clinical psychogist, and therapists. I suspect that the author's involvement in the pharmaceuticals field has blinded her to this. Many experts, such as Professor Richard Bental ('Doctoring the Minds' and 'Madness Explained') regard depression and even schizophrenia as understandable consequences of pressure from society and family (see also R D Laing's 'Politics of the Family' etc and Bateson's double bind hypothesis). Carey's search for a simple 'cause', though valid to some degree, is much too crude, and ignores so many complex factors. Her quoting of identical twin studies (too often glibly trotted out in general) needs to be questioned. Even twins who grow up together don't share the same experiences - one might have been traumatised, chastised, or otherwise changed in a fleeting moment while the other was absent - this is what creates differing personalities, and it does so through memory, the functioning of the mind, and even psychosomatic effects. All of these are down to neural networks, and we don't understand the functioning of neural networks yet, even at a quite basic level. It's jumping to conclusions to think that epigenetics is suddenly the key to 'mental illness'. An interesting fact about PTSD which caught my attention years ago, is that the commonly prescribed beta-blocker, propranolol, has been found to prevent PTSD if given to soldiers prior to battle. It is also said to 'kill conscience', and there is considerable evidence from research that emotional memories are erased and then put back when we remember events, and that re-living traumatic events while taking propranolol can block that 'putting back'. This poses serious questions for the role of methylation - how is the methylation in neurons involved in emotional memories undone every time we remember something; and if memories are constantly erased and put back, even those causing PTSD, doesn't that rather conflict with the argument that the permanence of methylation is the key? And does propranolol in fact affect methylation or some process around it (a topic for research)?

As I said, I'm not the average reader, having been passionately involved in these subjects for thirty or more years, and I know just how mind-bogglingly complicated they are becoming. All the more credit to Nessa Carey for tackling them in a book now, because studying papers is exhausting and takes time, even when you have access to them, and we need books that try to summarise, and access to other's ideas, if what E O Wilson calls 'consilience' across science disciplines is to be achieved. A great book, and I look forward to reading the next one on 'Junk' DNA when it comes out.

42 people found this helpful

Tristan Sherwin

this book will give you a greater appreciation of the complexity of life at a cellular level

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 15, 2016

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D.N.A (Deoxyribonucleic Acid) has very much found it’s way into the vernacular of our language. Most of us – I think? – can very easily form a mental picture of a double helix, recall the letters G C T A from our science lessons, and understand that these “letters” somehow form the building blocks of who we are. Most of us will have a grasp on how hereditary genetic traits work, and some of us might even know a few clever facts, like that Identical Twins have the exact same D.N.A.

And yet – Identical (Zygotic) Twins, over their life-cycle, can turn out different in many ways. Why?

Our cell life is a lot more complex than just the template of our D.N.A; there are other factors playing on the top of this genetic code, switching certain options “off” and “on”. Welcome to the world Epigenetics.

As someone who had heard of this term being banded around in science articles and TV shows, I wanted to learn a little bit more – after all, when I did Biology at School (in the mid 1990’s) this stuff certainly wasn’t mentioned on the public radar.

Nessa Carey has written an excellent book helping “numpties” like myself grasp hold of this new and exiting field in biology. It’s not a book that is shy of using biological terminology, and it involved me grappling with imagery that I had never even imagined before; but that’s the exciting thing about science! As well as providing you with the knowledge of why your male tortoiseshell cat will be infertile, this book will give you a greater appreciation of the complexity of life at a cellular level.

3 people found this helpful

K. Law

A very enjoyable read yet with much technical detail

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 29, 2016

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Some of the science in this book would at first glance look incomprehensible if it weren't for the amazingly clear narrative text. Using a chatty style and with thorough detailed explanations some complex ideas are clearly laid out.
I picked it up because I wanted to know just what DNA methylation was and I came away learning that and much more.
It needs to be read in chronological order because subsequent chapters build on previous explanations. I came with a basic knowledge of genetics which was sufficient for understanding. The basics are given as well, but don't detract from the more detailed scientific content. I would say it is suitable for anybody with GCSE biology behind them, but imagine most readers will be educated to A level or beyond. If you have a degree in genetic science this will be too simple for you.
I can say that I have not enjoyed a non-fiction book so much in a long time. Definitely recommended.

M. Hillmann

Rivetting, mind boggling science

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 7, 2013

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This is not an easy book, but is so stimulating it keeps you reading. It helps to have a background in biology. But if you are interested, Nessa Carey advances revolutionary ideas, in a deeply scientific yet comprehendable way.
When the human genome project finished sequencing human DNA at the beginning of the century it seemed as though we had the fundamental material on which to ground our genetic understanding. But only 2% of the DNA is responsible for making the building blocks of the embryo. Is the rest of the DNA really junk or are there other things going on?
If identical twins have identical genetic make up and genes are the only factor affecting development, how can the twins develop differently as they get older?
If genes are immutable how can environmental changes have long term biological consequences? Audrey Hepburn's mother was pregnant in Holland during the great Dutch famine of 1944-45. Audrey Hepburn was affected throughout life by stunted growth and poor health. But more than that, not only did offspring of mothers starved in early pregnancy suffer from a tendency to obesity as they inherited the compensation mechanism for starvation, but so did the grandchildren. Clearly an environmental change with biological consequences can be passed on down the generations.
Epigenetics holds the answer. Whenever two genetically identical individuals are non-identical in some way - this is epigenetics. When a change in environment has biological consequences that last long after the event itself we are seeing an epigenetic effect in action. Cells read the genetic code in DNA more like a script that needs interpretation. Epigenetics controls the switching on an off of genes as it interpretes the script.
Nessa Carey delves deep into the mechanism. At fertilisation the zygote is a single cell resulting from the fusion of one egg and one sperm. As various cells of the body begin to differentiate each cell becomes specialised. Once it is specialised you cannot easily unspecialise it. However Nessa Carey vividly tells the story of how Professor Yamanaka did just that. He developed a technique to switch off genes. Incidentally she also vividly describes the intense competition between research scientists and often vicious attacks on each other.
Epigenetics depends upon the ability for genes to be switched on and switched off. Nessa describes in great detail how methylation of DNA and histone action causes genes to be switched on or switched off. It is mesmerising to learn about the science even if I cannot remember it!
The excitement involved in the potential of gene therapy and the development of epigenetic drugs to treat cancer is infectious. Epigenetics may be controversial in the scientific community. It makes for a very stimulating if heavy book.

4 people found this helpful

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