Sex, Love and DNA: What Molecular Biology Teaches Us About Being Human

Sex, Love and DNA: What Molecular Biology Teaches Us About Being Human

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Can the discoveries of 21st-century molecular biology answer age-old questions about the human experience? Can studying proteins and DNA help us understand how we make our choices in sex and love? How we communicate? Why some people are able to become top athletes, while others have the intellectual gifts to become outstanding scientists or artists? Where our emotions come from? Or why we age and die? In the past such questions have generally been reserved for philosophers or psychologists, and some will argue that this is as it should be. Yet we are biological animals, and by studying biology, and especially the biology of cells and proteins and DNA, we can learn a lot about what it means to be human. Sex, Love and DNA describes how genetics and the environment affect our cells and thereby shape our lives. Every concept in the book, however elementary, is explained in a way that is understandable without any previous knowledge of biology or genetics. But don’t worry Sex, Love and DNA isn't a textbook. You’ll discover biology through stories: stories of people who don’t feel pain because of rare genetic variants, and children whose DNA enables them to perform unusual feats of strength. Individuals whose genes have given them healthy lives past the age of 100, and people who can't speak or read simply because they lack certain proteins. In short, you'll share the excitement the scientific community is experiencing as it addresses perhaps the greatest intellectual challenge of all – the challenge that Socrates described more than two thousand years ago as “to know thyself.”