Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body Kindle Edition

Every once in a while I come across a science book by accident that are absolutely incredible. This is one such book. I teach physiology and pathophysiology at a university in Utah, but I always am looking for good books on genetics. I liked the way the author approached this from a different and less straight-forward point. In using people with differences such as children with one eye that we call 'cyclops' and explaining how things go wrong in the genes, Leroi provides an excellent illustration of what needs to go right in the body in order to achieve an acceptable two eyes in the normal face. How it fails, brings on the cyclops condition.

I always mix history with my teaching about the body, because in neuroscience (my background) you learn the more ways you connect information to multiple parts of the brain through using stories, humor, etc the more likely the students are to remember what they are learning. That's what this book provides. Usually genetics can be a very long-winded and difficult thing to understand. But books like this makes much of this information available to everyone in a different format. I had to laugh with another reviewer who stated if her textbooks were like this she would actually read them. This is so true about textbooks, and I've been saying this for years. People who write textbooks, write them for their peers and not for the students!

Don't worry if you don't remember too much from high school biology, this book is written in a way that does not require much foreknowledge of the subject. Just re-watch the scene from the first Jurassic Park with the cartoon DNA strand and you should be good.
The author is incredibly respectful and the book is fact based with no wild speculation as to the future of genetics, covering what we used to know versus what we know now. The reader will learn more about their own body and be able to marvel at the intricacies that make up genetic variety across humanity. I bought this book out of curiosity and I do not regret a single moment I spent reading it!

This is a fantastic book! It deals with the subject matter delicately and respectfully. Leroi's style is very pleasing to the eye and his penchant for
alluding to things Classical is appreciated. Leroi's explanation of the science is well done. The pictures are tasteful (only one or two are actually disturbing). I can't recommend this enough to anyone. It's helped me place this seemingly unreasonable feature of life on this Earth in an appropriate context.

my family (the family i raised, not my parents) is one that always got every book we could find on circus 'freaks' and human anomalies. why? i am not sure, but in recent years as i have tried to work out the genetics of giants and bigfoot, etc, i have constantly found perhaps the only information available about the population genetics of the rarer pockets of human variety.

while this book has the familiar cover with drawings of the skeletons of mutated humans, the author has done what the older books could never do-tell what mutation on the DNA has caused the problem. it is generally a mutation that occurs within the first cell divisions of a developing fetus.

his chapter on gender presents cases of children raised as female who at puberty suddenly become male. he relates the histories of a young french girl named Marie who lept over a style and had a penis fall out.

several tribes in the world have an abnormally high incidence of this occurring. when such a child is born, they raise it first as a girl, understanding that at puberty it will become a boy.

the author discusses the spotted hyena which made the defect into a functioning population with some rather gnarly nasty bits.

if you are a person who wants to know about this sort of thing, i do not think there is another book that offers what this one does.

This is a very readable book, only getting too technical once or twice, but for the most part fully explaining concepts for his readers.

Leroi bases his study of mutations in human beings on the philosophy of Francis Bacon. Bacon helped establish the principles by which the scientific inquiry of the natural world was to be conducted. Bacon saw that natural history can be divided intot he study of normal nature, aberrant nature, and nature manipulated by man. Leroi writes: "Centureies ahead of his time, Bacon recognized that the pursuit of the causes of error is not an end in itlsef, bur rather just a means. The monstrous, the strange, the deviant, or merely the different, he is saying, reveal the laws of nature. And once we know those laws, we can reconstruct the world as we wish."

The range of Leroi's knowledge is considerable. The story repeatedly drew together the fields of philosophy, anthropology, history, and molecular biology.

Leroi is the one of the first to discuss that in Africa the Delta 32 polymorphism of the CCR5 gene is currently increasing in frequency because it confers resistance to HIV. We know that CCR5 in some lucky persons of Northern European background gives them some protection against HIV infection. However this trait is so rare among Africans that I suspect the increase will not make significant changes in the grim outlook for sub-Saharan Africa.

The book is actually hopeful even though it discusses the many ways that we as humans can go genetically 'wrong'. Leroi states: "The aveage newly conceived human bears three hundred mutations that impair its health in some fashion."

Leroi's historic studies add much to the book. He uncovers the range of enlightened thinkers who saw human mutations, not as the work of the devil, but as opportunity to study God's methods. For example he quotes Montaigne: "Those whom we call monsters are not so with GOd, who in the immensity of his work seeth the infinite forms therein contained."

Of course there are times that the book makes your hair stand on end. For example: "In 1982, a thirty-five-year-old Chinese man was reported with a parasitic head embedded in the right side of his own head. The extra head had a small brain, two weak eyes, two eyebrows, a nose, twelve teeth, a tongue and lots of hair. When the main head pursed its lips, stuck out its tongue or blinked its eyelids, so did the parasitic head; when the main head ate, the parasite drooled...A Dutch child born in 1995 had the remains of twenty-one foetuses (as determined by a leg count) embedded in its brain."

There is a very interesting case study of the artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. "By the time he was seven his mother had taken him to Lourdes, where she hoped to find a cure for some vaguely described limb problem... By the age of ten he was complaining of constant severe pains in his legs and thighs, and at thirteen minor falls caused fractures in both femurs which, to judge from the length of time during which he supported himself with canes, took about six months to heal. He would use a cane nearly all his adult life. Laurterc also undertwent some unusual facial changes. He developed a pendoulous lower lip, a tendency to drool, and a speech impediment rather like a growling lisp, and his teeth rotted while he was still in his teens."

The examples continue to build on each other, offering new inforamtion and insight throughout the book.