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

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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 The Inner Me (your values, self matters, music you enjoy, what makes you happy, your true nature, what you are grateful for) The RRP is the suggested or Recommended Retail Price of a product, set by the publisher or manufacturer.

The Book of Me : Ben Javens (illustrator), : 9781912891610

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. The whole unthinkably small and nimble process can sequence thousands of bases a second, with an accuracy, after seven reads, of one error per 3 million base pairs. The short sequenced fragments are then matched against the known reference human genome, like millions of mosaic bits assembled on top of a wall sketch. Overlap these aligned fragments until each of the 6 billion nucleotide bases in a person’s genome has been sampled a dozen or more times, and you have a reasonably accurate picture of that person’s genetic secrets. I try to imagine the worst case, something like Huntington’s: a definitive prediction of a horrific monogenetic disease without any treatment beyond general symptom management. I might learn that I am a prime candidate for early Alzheimer’s. I might learn that my risk of macular degeneration is several times the base rate. I might learn of susceptibilities for ALS or Crohn’s disease or schizophrenia or prostate, bladder, or lung cancer. I guess I’m groundlessly hoping that my own red ags will be limited to elevated risks for things like heart disease or diabetes, odds that I might be able to tilt slightly in my favor by prophylactic intervention or behavioral changes. In any case, I’ll live with whatever I learn from here on out. No possible good news can be hiding in my genome except, at best, no definitive news at all. So what about the enormous majority of the genome with no known function? It turns out that much of those vast, mysterious tracts that used to be called “junk DNA” have been faithfully preserved over eons and seem to have gene-regulatory functions. I’m guessing that if those stretches are junk, they’re the kind of junk that will come down out of the attic to fetch big prices on Antiques Roadshow. I can tell you that you have the ‘novelty-seeking’ allele,” Conde announces. He’s referring to a single study that associates a longer version of the DRD4 gene on chromosome 11, involved in the brain’s dopamine system, with people who need higher levels of stimulation. A novelist in search of novelty: Nihil sub sole novum.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 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.

The Book of Myself (New edition): A Do-It-Yourself The Book of Myself (New edition): A Do-It-Yourself

I reach the Fens, where I once lived with a woman whom I’d talked into moving to this city. We broke up, in part, over the children issue. Neither she nor I nor the man she married nor the woman I married have ever procreated. At least 25 percent of us is a full-edged Supporter of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. But I think of all the couples, in the years to come, who will study their own genomes out of concern over what they might hand down to their offspring. There will be those who demand (or even steal) a copy of their betrothed’s full sequence before signing the prenup.

From the Publisher

The Book of Me contains hundreds of guided questions organized into sections about your past, present, future, family history, and inner self. This keepsake volume contains hundreds of guided questions organized into sections about your past, present, and future, family history, and inner self. We spend two hours discussing the future of genomics and personalized medicine, during which I’m almost numbly calm. Kiirikki points out that more people have walked on the Moon (twelve) than have had their full genomes sequenced (nine). Rienhoff stresses the need for subtler association studies, working outwards from individual patient histories and environments. Church says that sequencing power and speed have increased ten-thousand-fold in four years, massively dwarfing Moore’s law, which would produce a mere quadrupling in the same period. The others call for major educational support if society is to have a prayer of keeping up. Contents: Introduction, The Facts of Life, My Life: A Personal History, All in the Family, All About Me, The Inner Me, What Next? Conde and Yoo tell me that 4,652,848,316 of my DNA fragments have been reassembled against the human reference genome and verified for accuracy. The interpretation of my genome is under way. I’m suddenly unnerved at talking to these people; they’ve read my damn book, and I haven’t, yet. Conde asks me to return to Boston in mid-August, to join a daylong roundtable discussion with medical and genetic experts who will talk me through my genome and the susceptibilities it indicates.