One of the key thinkers behind that idea was a biologist named Kevin Esvelt. Recently Esvelt did something remarkable: he got in touch with me to let me know he now thinks that the idea is a bad one. Maybe even a dangerous one. This week, I wrote about Esvelt's change of heart in my column for the New York Times.
If this drama intrigues you, you can find a lot more where that came from in my book She Has Her Mother's Laugh, which is coming out in May. CRISPR is so powerful that it forces us to think hard about what about heredity matters to us, and why it exactly it does so.
I'm done with the proofreading for the book, and now I'm starting to get it in front of some early readers. Two personal writer-heroes of mine have kind things to say about it:
David Grann, New Yorker staff writer and author most recently of Killers of the Flower Moon, says, “No one unravels the mysteries of science as brilliantly and compellingly as Carl Zimmer, and he has proven it again with She Has Her Mother’s Laugh-—a sweeping, magisterial book that illuminates the very nature of who we are.”
And here's Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford physiologist whose latest book is Behave: “Humans have long noticed something remarkable, namely that organisms are similar but not identical to their parents—in other words, that some traits can be inherited. From this observation has grown the elegant science of genetics, with its dazzling medical breakthroughs. And from this has also grown the toxic pseudosciences of eugenics, Lysenkoism and Nazi racial ideology. Carl Zimmer traces the intertwined histories of the science and pseudoscience of heredity. Zimmer writes like a dream, teaches a ton of accessible science, and provides the often intensely moving stories of the people whose lives have been saved or destroyed by this topic. I loved this book.”
(In the last issue of Friday's Elk, I used a bad link for pre-orders. You can pre-order the book here.)
In other news: I'll be hosting my next evening in the series, "What is Life?" on December 6. The question we'll explore will be, "Is Life Inevitable?" I'll be talking to Jeremy England, an MIT physicist who sees life as stitched into the physical laws of the cosmos. Then I'll be talking to Steven Benner, a leading expert on the origin of life, who will tell us about all the weird forms life might take elsewhere in the universe.
The conversations will take place at Caveat, in lower Manhattan, at 7:30 pm on December 6. You can get a ticket here.
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.
You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.
Best wishes, Carl
If you'd like to learn more about my books, you can visit my web site
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