As regular readers of Friday's Elk know, I've been chugging away for a couple years now on a book about heredity--its history and its future, what scientists have discovered about it and what it means to us all.
At last, I can share with you the cover of
She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become. I wish I could say that this lovely image was my idea. But the jacket design is the work of Pete Garceau, and the art was created by Sandra Culliton.
The book will arrive in bookstores May 29, 2018. But already my publisher is getting some endorsements. Ed Yong, staff writer at
The Atlantic and author of
I Contain Multitudes, has this to say:
"She Has Her Mother's Laugh is a masterpiece--a career-best work from one of the world's premier science writers, on a topic that literally touches every person on the planet."
Even though the official publication date is months away, you can pre-order the book now. And I hope you do! Pre-ordering, you may be surprised to learn, is a huge boon to authors these days. It helps make a book more prominent on book-selling web sites, which in turn helps bring it to the attention of radio producers, reviewers, and others who can help spread the word even more.
So I'd be incredibly grateful if you'd help build the momentum. Take your pick from these links (and share them with your friends!):
Amazon,
Barnes and Noble,
IndieBound, or
iBooks.
I was inspired to write this book because heredity is at once so familiar and so alien. It is something we all know about, and yet it also manages to keep us perpetually perplexed. What do we inherit from our ancestors, exactly? How does life's past shape its present? DNA is an important part of the answer, but we can't stop there. If we do, we fall prey to all sorts of fallacies. For example, it can come as a surprise to learn that if you go back nine or ten generations, you can find many ancestors from whom you inherit no DNA at all.
In
She Has Her Mother's Laugh, I explore the history of this intimately mysterious concept--the shifting explanations as to why like engenders like. I trace the origins of our modern concept of heredity through long-running obsessions with breeding crops and livestock, with defining races of people to be persecuted and even enslaved, with searching for the causes of medical disorders that arise from within. I look at how twenty-first-century studies of genomes have shed light on the astonishing complexity by which heredity influences traits ranging from height to intelligence. And I show how genetic explorations of our ancestry challenge simplistic notions of our inherited identity.
In the book, I consider how we can expand our notion of heredity. It takes place not just betweeen generations, but within our own bodies as well. You can trace a genealogy of the cells in your brain, for example. I also examine controversial arguments that heredity can take place beyond genes, carried across the generations through other channels such as culture or even microbes. A broader understanding of heredity is vital for us to grapple with our new found power--thanks to tools like CRISPR--to alter heredity itself: to steer it on new courses or simply break its familiar rules.
I'll have more news about the book in future issues of Friday's Elk.
Meanwhile...I published a couple things this week in the
New York Times.
First up is a column about one especially weird form of heredity:
ancient viruses. A surprising amount of our genome is made up of DNA from viruses that infected our ancestors millions of years ago. We've inherited their genes ever since. A series of new studies have provided new clues to how important they are for our health--even for our survival as embryos.
The
Times also asked me to investigate the strange row between the U.S. and Cuba, sparked by a mysterious outbreak of nausea and other symptoms in American diplomats. The idea that the diplomats are being attacked with a sonic weapon has gained a lot of currency.
But acoustics researchers I talked to found that notion unlikely. In the Friday paper, my article on sonic weapons appeared, plus a "Times Insider" piece on
what it's like to wade into international disputes as a science writer.
This week, Medscape posted
a video interview I had with Eric Topol about becoming a science writer, reporting on genomics, and contending with genetic tests that assure me I'm a bald warrior.
And, finally, on Thursday, October 12, I'll be speaking at Stony Brook, giving the first AAAS Kavli Lecture. My talk is called "Science Reporting in the Age of Fake News." It will be livestreamed, too:
details here.
Upcoming Talks
October 12, Stony Brook University, New York: Provost's Lecture.
Science Reporting in the Age of Fake News.
October 20: New York: Imagine Science Film Festival Closing Night.
Details.
October 28 & 29, San Francisco. World Conference of Science Journalists. I'll be speaking at two sessions.
Details.
November 1, New York.
"What Is Life?" Night 2: How did life start?
November 8, University of Oxford.
Twelfth Annual Baruch Blumberg Lecture
December 6, New York.
"What Is Life?" Night 3: Is life inevitable?
December 20, New York.
"What Is Life?" Night 4: What did the first life look like?
January 3-7, 2018 San Francisco:
Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting, Plenary Lecture
February 15, 2018, Rochester, NY:
Neilly Series Lecture. Details to come.
The End
As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can
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carlzimmer.com.
Best wishes, Carl
(Photo by Paul Fetters for the Smithsonian Institution)
Last week I let you know about my upcoming series of talks about life. Here's an update with the details of the full schedule. All four events will take place at 
A few days ago I reached the end of my manuscript for 
