She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity

In this thought-provoking book, award-winning New York Times columnist and science writer Carl Zimmer presents a history of our understanding of heredity, in a wide-ranging, ambitious and original investigation of a force that has crucially shaped human society - and is set to shape our future even more radically.
Heredity isn't a simple matter of genes that pass from parent to child. It continues within our own bodies, as a single cell gives rise to the trillions that make up an adult. We say we inherit genes from our ancestors - using a verb that once specifically referred to kingdoms and aristocratic estates - but we also inherit other things that matter as much or more to our lives, from microbes to the technologies we use to make life more comfortable. We need a new - broader-ranging - definition of what heredity is.
Weaving historical and current scientific research, original reporting and his own experience as the father of two daughters, Zimmer unpacks the urgent ethical quandaries that arise from new biomedical technologies, but also long-standing presumptions about who we really are and what it is that we can pass on to future generations.
'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.' Ed Yong, author of I Contain Multitudes
'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' David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z
'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 the science and pseudoscience of heredity . . . I loved this book.' Robert Sapolsky, author of Behave