What interests me most about current genetics research, I think, is the apparent discovery of genes for anxiety, say, or ones that allow or prevent you learning from your mistakes -- the science that indicates that your personality is genetically determined. It's both frightening and fascinating stuff and I wonder if it's going to turn out to be accurate -- or as accurate as phrenology was, which is to say, not at all. Phrenology chart found here.
I highly recommend Masha Gessen's Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene, which I devoured after reading this review. The first part of the review focuses on Gessen's own struggle to decide what to do after she discovered she has the genetic mutation for breast cancer -- and that's very interesting stuff -- but the book really is much broader than that. It started as a series of articles for Slate -- get a taste of them here. I've always been fascinated by the field of genetics -- ever since performing one of those black and white mice-breeding experiments in high school -- but my interest has been piqued again, probably because of this pregnancy and the testing options now available. David and I have a letter my ob-gyn sent us while we were trying to conceive Luke -- it says, "Dear Mr. and Mrs. Aulenback: After receiving your test results, I am happy to inform you that you are entirely normal." I plan on pulling it out as proof once the kids hit adolescence and start indicating that we're freaks. If you know of any good books -- or websites -- about genetics (for the general public not specialist stuff), please do email or leave a comment.
While I was reading Gessen's book, I also happened to be reading John Wyndham's terrific sci-fi novel The Chrysalids
, which made for a mini genetics theme. Set a few centuries after a nuclear apocalypse -- at which point most of North America is a barren, burned-out wasteland -- it is about a tiny group of telepathic people who are born into a small farming community in Labrador that has made a religion out of stamping out the many abnormalities, genetic or otherwise, that have arisen in plants, animals, and humans since the disaster. I'm not sure that after a nuclear holocaust life in Newfoundland and Labrador would fare as well as Wyndham thought it might -- we here in the Atlantic provinces, remote as we are socially, tend to get New York's weather systems only a day or two after that city does. But that quibble aside, I loved it. (Interesting how willing one is to quibble with sci-fi as opposed to magic realism -- I guess that's because what makes a work of science fiction really good is that eerily apt prophetic quality.)
As soon as I put that one down, I borrowed two other Wyndhams from the library: The Day of the Triffids
and The Midwich Cuckoos
. Cuckoos which I have not read yet, is, apparently, about murderously psychotic alien babies who are born to an entire village full of very surprised pregnant women. It is therefore perhaps not appropriate reading for a surprised pregnant lady with a nervous sensibility but I intend to read it nonetheless. I read Triffids yesterday and was astonished by the similarity of the premise -- one morning the inhabitants of the entire planet wake up blind with the exception only of a very lucky few -- to that of Saramago's Blindness, one of my very favourite books. Saramago turned the premise into an incredibly moving and masterful fable. Wyndham's sci-fi version is a little too convoluted -- hey, why not throw in some walking, talking, man-eating plants while we're at it?-- and a little too preachy, but it is still excellent. I'm willing to bet that Saramago had read Triffids before writing Blindness -- I wonder if anyone's ever asked him.
Now after all those hellishly apocalyptic scenarios -- I couldn't sleep last night after finishing Triffids -- I really need some nice, light, "middlebrow" reading that doesn't make me want to puke sugar cubes. For that, I am turning to Oxford scholar Simon Thomas, over at Stuck in a Book, who has compiled a list of everything he read in 2008 and has highlighted his favourites, including a few by A. A. Milne I'd never heard of. The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters
and others, here I come.