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

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Here is the vehicle to embrace�with playfulness and intuitive insight�your own version of the life you have lived. Record family history and the details of your life while giving expression to your inner voice.

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

Only three human beings—James Watson, J. Craig Venter, and an anonymous Chinese scientist—had had their essentially complete diploid genomes sequenced. A few more were in the works. Already the race was under way to make the process ordinary. Here was my real story: the infancy of direct-to-consumer complete genetic blueprints. The feeling goes away by midweek. How are you doing? my friends ask. Same as ever. Where have you been? Up in the attic, going through the inheritance.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 My secret self is the same whether I'm in a crowd of people or alone in my apartment. It's who I am when I'm in the middle of fresh heartbreak, but it's also me when I believe I'll find love again. It's me when I've lost my best cat buddy, but it's also me when I've taken in a new punk-ass kitten. It is the constant part of me I can always count on—my true self.

The Book of Me by Chellie Carroll, Ellen Bailey | Waterstones The Book of Me by Chellie Carroll, Ellen Bailey | Waterstones

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. He also predicts that all newborns might one day be subject to routine whole-genome scans, holding out hope for all kinds of early detection and intervention. The cost of infant screening for several genetic conditions is now a couple of hundred dollars, often paid by the state. A couple of thousand dollars for a whole genome sequence might pay for itself several times over by the time any newborn reaches adulthood. Rachel Kempster is a crafter, blogger and book publicist who has written for The San Diego Reader and has appeared on the Today show as a corporate spokesperson.Meg Leder is a published author and book editor. She has written for iVillage, Match.com, Writer s Digest, Children s Writer s and Illustrator s Market, and Cincinnati Magazine and has appeared on The Martha Stewart Show as a craft expert. They are the authors of The Happy Book.

By looking at the things you keep in the dark, you'll tap into secret parts of you in a deeper way, learning to celebrate what you usually keep quiet and unspoken. You'll discover what you're made of: the strength that will carry you through days of joy and spring, days of heartbreak and loss, days of the ordinary.

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

What happens once my DNA reaches China is subject to change. The few different possibilities are contingent on very rapid developments in hardware and software. Knome is improvising as uidly and continuously as the rest of us will have to once the revolution hits. 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.This book is about recognizing who you were, who you are, who you wish to be. It's not about self-help or self-improvement— I try out various scenarios on him: personally tailored drugs, in vitro trait selection, even trans-human genetic enhancement. Are these ideas just science fiction?

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

The next morning, as he fights a BMW Zipcar through insane traffic, Jorge Conde asks me, only partly in jest, how long I think we’ll have to wait before they invent the matter transporter. We’re on our way to the office of George Church at Harvard Medical School, but the snarl of rush hour is proving vicious. Conde, a congenital optimist, doesn’t see why teleportation isn’t conceivable. He mentions the recent laboratory successes with single-particle quantum tunneling. It’s just a matter of scaling up, he insists. I laugh, before remembering that we’re embarking on something that was once every bit as inconceivable. As for the perils of looking into his own future, Kucherlapati himself is quite ready, “even as an older person,” to have his complete genome sequenced. He’s not particularly concerned about the majority of dire information that sequencing might reveal—all the predispositions about which medicine can as yet do nothing. I wonder out loud if we aren’t in danger of pathologizing ordinary health, turning us all into pre-patients for diseases we are only at risk of contracting. He responds by asking me why I’m not eating any of the delicious Afghani meat dishes spread in front of us. I confess to having had a lipid panel recently: combined score 207. Kucherlapati holds up his hands, vindicated. We’re already there. He says that gene tests will work much like a cholesterol screen, only they will give us personalized targets and much more specific knowledge. I ask if that’s a good thing or a bad one. No one answers, and none of us have dessert. I come from a long line of folks, on my mother’s side, with congenital difficulty making choices. My father’s family, on the other hand, are born snap deciders. This time the paternal genes won out, and half an hour after reading the invitation, I was on board. In the technique, the short fragments of prepared DNA are primed on each end and read simultaneously from both directions: two reads for the price of one. That means five passes across my entire sequence will yield the accuracy of ten reads, equaling or sometimes even exceeding the accuracy of the human reference genome. I’ll be the first commercial subject to be sequenced with the method. My Google Earth map has just become a good deal crisper and more reliable across the board, and commercial sequencing has just halved in cost, once again.Medically, all that my 6 billion data points will tell me are probabilities, most of them not actionable, but probabilities that are gradually becoming something firmer. Maybe chief among the other things my genome might tell me (if only briey) is what it felt like, for a while, not to know. What the sequence certainly will not tell me is anything about who I am, where I’m going, or how I got from childhood—let alone my young adulthood in the Boston Fens, head filled with the wildest of fictional books—to a man of 50 in a cab on Boylston Street, about to be told the sum total of the code that I was born with and that will take me on into the grave. Denouement AFTER 2,000 MAN-HOURS and 9,000 supercomputer CPU hours, my genome is ready. I return to Boston in mid-August, this time staying at the old nineteenth-century Charles Street Jail, recently turned into a twenty-first-century luxury hotel: old inheritances transformed into new variations. When I eat with Conde and Kiirikki again, it’s in a new restaurant. It has to be: I have the novelty gene. They’re bursting with excitement, trying not to give away tomorrow’s show. wasn't one of my favorite years. I went through some personal stuff that left me reeling, and I had to have my wonderful fourteen-year- The idea of contributing to a vast, wiki-like public library of genetic research greatly appealed to me. But I couldn’t quite imagine putting my comprehensive genetic data—data that also belonged to my whole family—online. I could see how ordinary all this will one day become, how declaring whether you had the version of the APOE gene that correlates with late-onset Alzheimer’s might one day become as normal as slapping a pub shot up on your blog or discussing your Zoloft dosage at a dinner party. I just couldn’t bring myself to become one of the first dozen people to inhabit the place. All those books wrestle with the limits of the human—whether to accept them nobly or rage against them all the way to death. As I walk through the Victory Gardens, I wonder what tomorrow’s novels will look like, when the limits to the natural course of human life will be up for grabs again.