Bossypants - Tina Fey

 Picked this up a a thrift store for $3.00 and it was enough of a read to cover the cost.  I hadn't known much about her career, being familiar only with her hosting duties at awards shows and her TV show.  I was impressed with her business sense and the viewpoint of someone the same generation as my son.

Quote:

"When did you first feel like a grown woman and not a girl?"  We wrote down our answers and shared them...but the answers had a very similar theme.  Almost everyone first realized they were becoming a grown woman when some dude did something nasty to them."

Published: 2011  Read: May 2021  Genre: Auto-biography 

Coming Apart - Daphne Rose Kingma

 Sub-title: How to Heal Your Broken Heart

Enough said.

Published: 2018  Read: May 2021  Genre: Self-Help

Where'd You Go, Bernadette? - Maria Semple

This was an entertaining read.  The story is told by a young woman through a series of letters and emails between her mother and the other characters in the story.  Her mother has disappeared and she's trying to find out why.   A quirky story that was made into a movie I don't think I'll watch.

"You need to be prepared for novel experiences because often they signal danger.  If you live in a jungle full of fragrant flowers, you have to stop being so overwhelmed by the lovely smell because otherwise your couldn't smell a predator.  That's why your brain is considered a discounting mechanism. It's literally a matter of survival."

"When your eyes are softly focused on the horizon for sustained periods, your brain release endorphins.  It's the same as a runner's high.  These days, we all spend our lives staring at screens twelve inches in front of us.  It's a nice change". 

Published: 2012  Read: May 2021  Genre: Fiction

The Codebreaker - Walter Isaacson

Sub-title: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

This was a wonderful read for so many reasons. Isaacson introduces the story by explaining the three great revolutions experienced in modern times: the industrial, the information and now, the life sciences revolution.  He compares the growth of people being able to do digital coding by manipulating bits, the on/off switches of the information technology world, to the future growth of people who will do genetic coding by editing and manipulating our DNA.  The innovators in both are those who can not only read the code but write it.

 I'd heard the term "CRISPR" and knew it had to do with DNA but didn't understand what it was.  The author took us through the life of Jennifer Doudna, the Nobel Prize winning microbiologist whose curiosity led her from an early age to pursue RNA, the messenger part of our genetic makeup.  She won the Nobel Prize along with Emmanuelle Charpentier, for their research on how to alter our genes and how to "cut" DNA using  RNA to point to the edit point.  CRISPR -  Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats - that were discovered in the 1980s, provides this pointer to where the editing of  DNA is desired. Doudna and Charpentier showed how to use CRISPR as an editing tool. 

I was swept along in the story that wove the history of the discovery of DNA, the effort to map the human genome and the ability to edit genes with CRISPR into a coherent, understandable whole.  At the same time the author revealed the cooperation and competition among scientists and their human side as collaborators and competitors.

I was uplifted to read of their cooperation in finding ways to test for Covid-19 when it emerged in 2020 and of their dedication and single mindedness in pursuing solutions. Several chapters are devoted to explaining and exploring the ethical use of the CRISPR technology and how it might be regulated, providing thought-provoking discussion.

 I can't recommend this book enough.

Quotes:

"[from Emmanuelle Charpentier] I began to see myself as a scientist and not just as a student...I wanted to create knowledge, not just learn it."

"1998 conference at UCLA...focused on the ethics of making genetic edits that would be inherited.  These 'germline edits 'were fundamentally different, medically and morally, from somatic-cell edits that affect only certain cells in an individual patient.  The germline was a red line that scientists had been reluctant to cross."

"On most great moral issues, there are two competing perspectives.  One emphasizes individual rights, personal liberty, and deference to person choice [Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia].  The other are those that view justice and morality through the lens of what is best for the society and perhaps even the species [John Rawls's A Theory of Justice].

Notes:

"Count Me In" - public database with DNA shared by cancer patients.

1997 film Gattaca (the title is made up of the letter of the four DNA bases) told of the potential of genetic screening and selection.

Preprint servers such as Rxiv and bioRxiv, free and open publishing of scientific research papers.

Published: 2021   Read: May 2021   Genre: Science, Biography

The Boy, the mole, the fox and the Horse - Charles Mackesy

 I needed some thoughtful reflection and my sister recommended this book.  It's a gentle story of friendship and life, told through pen and ink drawings and the comments of the four characters written in cursive.  Every line could be pondered.  Good for the soul.

Published: 2019  Read: May 2021 Genre: Philosophy