| Summary: | Why are most of us born with one nose, two legs, ten fingers and twenty-four ribs - and some of us not? Why do most of us stop growing in our teens — while others just keep going? Why do some of us have heads of red hair — and others no hair at all? The human genome, we are told, makes us what we are. But how? This is a book of stories: of a French convent girl who found herself changing sex upon puberty - and her miserable death in a Parisian garret; of children who, echoing Homer's Cyclops, are born with a single eye in the middle of their foreheads; of a village of long-lived Croatian dwarves; of a hairy family who were kept at the Burmese royal court for four generations (and from whom Darwin took one of his keenest insights into heredity); and of the ostrich-footed Wadoma of the Zambezi river valley. In Mutants, Armand Marie Leroi gives a brilliant narrative account of our genetic grammar and the people whose bodies have revealed it. Stepping effortlessly from myth to molecular biology, this elegant, humane and illuminating book is about us all. |
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