The Book of Me, 2nd Edition (Autobiographical Journal)

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The Book of Me is a guided journal of self-discovery. It takes readers on a journey inside themselves, helping them explore their mind, their moods, their imagination, their conscience, and how they determine the course of their lives. Alongside wise and engaging explanations of ideas, each chapter contains a wealth of interactive exercises that together help to create a rich and unique self-portrait. Through writing, drawing, cutting out and colouring in, children can begin to untangle the mysteries of existence and work out who they really are (and who they might become…). Here is the vehicle to embraceâ��with playfulness and intuitive insightâ��your own version of the life you have lived. Record family history and the details of your life while giving expression to your inner voice. In the technique, the short fragments of prepared DNA are primed on each end and read simultaneously from both directions: two reads for the price of one. That means five passes across my entire sequence will yield the accuracy of ten reads, equaling or sometimes even exceeding the accuracy of the human reference genome. I’ll be the first commercial subject to be sequenced with the method. My Google Earth map has just become a good deal crisper and more reliable across the board, and commercial sequencing has just halved in cost, once again. The RRP is the suggested or Recommended Retail Price of a product, set by the publisher or manufacturer. I can tell you that you have the ‘novelty-seeking’ allele,” Conde announces. He’s referring to a single study that associates a longer version of the DRD4 gene on chromosome 11, involved in the brain’s dopamine system, with people who need higher levels of stimulation. A novelist in search of novelty: Nihil sub sole novum.

The Book of Me, 2nd Edition (Autobiographical Journal The Book of Me, 2nd Edition (Autobiographical Journal

The whole unthinkably small and nimble process can sequence thousands of bases a second, with an accuracy, after seven reads, of one error per 3 million base pairs. The short sequenced fragments are then matched against the known reference human genome, like millions of mosaic bits assembled on top of a wall sketch. Overlap these aligned fragments until each of the 6 billion nucleotide bases in a person’s genome has been sampled a dozen or more times, and you have a reasonably accurate picture of that person’s genetic secrets. Just like that, I slip into the era of personal genomics, the logical extension of the endless cloud of risk management we have been living under for some time. Now I know what risks I have been dealt, and if I don’t take appropriate actions to try to evade them, the onus is on me. But what actions? Yoo and Rienhoff step me through the charts, and I enter my very own war on terror, monitoring lots of ambiguous chatter that is impossible to understand without more context, that I can respond to only in qualified and indirect ways, that I can’t defeat, but that I can at best hold at bay—a standing low-grade condition of Orange Alert that demands perpetual increased surveillance. Yoo and Rienhoff are expert in their reading. They remind me that my future is less a question of which particular alleles I have than of how my combinations of genes interact with the sum of all my environments. Should I take my Alzheimer’s risks any more seriously than I do my susceptibility to obesity? What about my epigenome—the complex meta-system of gene regulation just now beginning to be researched? How can I tell when, where, or how often my given genes will be expressed? Figuring that will require much deeper, harder, and more subtle acts of reading—something like the difference between sounding out the word w-a-t-e-r and knowing what the word means.No matter what, in a few months Conde will hand me my own 6-billion-base sequence, so that I can follow along as scientists learn how to read that inscrutable inheritance. But first he has to get us to George Church’s office. “I inherited an absolutely terrible sense of direction,” he confesses. “I’ve got the disorientation allele. I can only get from A to B along a route that I already know.” The Book of Me contains hundreds of guided questions organized into sections about your past, present, future, family history, and inner self. Conde and Yoo tell me that 4,652,848,316 of my DNA fragments have been reassembled against the human reference genome and verified for accuracy. The interpretation of my genome is under way. I’m suddenly unnerved at talking to these people; they’ve read my damn book, and I haven’t, yet. Conde asks me to return to Boston in mid-August, to join a daylong roundtable discussion with medical and genetic experts who will talk me through my genome and the susceptibilities it indicates. Only three human beings—James Watson, J. Craig Venter, and an anonymous Chinese scientist—had had their essentially complete diploid genomes sequenced. A few more were in the works. Already the race was under way to make the process ordinary. Here was my real story: the infancy of direct-to-consumer complete genetic blueprints. What happens once my DNA reaches China is subject to change. The few different possibilities are contingent on very rapid developments in hardware and software. Knome is improvising as uidly and continuously as the rest of us will have to once the revolution hits.

The Book of Me | GQ The Book of Me | GQ

I try to imagine the worst case, something like Huntington’s: a definitive prediction of a horrific monogenetic disease without any treatment beyond general symptom management. I might learn that I am a prime candidate for early Alzheimer’s. I might learn that my risk of macular degeneration is several times the base rate. I might learn of susceptibilities for ALS or Crohn’s disease or schizophrenia or prostate, bladder, or lung cancer. I guess I’m groundlessly hoping that my own red ags will be limited to elevated risks for things like heart disease or diabetes, odds that I might be able to tilt slightly in my favor by prophylactic intervention or behavioral changes. In any case, I’ll live with whatever I learn from here on out. No possible good news can be hiding in my genome except, at best, no definitive news at all. The next morning, as he fights a BMW Zipcar through insane traffic, Jorge Conde asks me, only partly in jest, how long I think we’ll have to wait before they invent the matter transporter. We’re on our way to the office of George Church at Harvard Medical School, but the snarl of rush hour is proving vicious. Conde, a congenital optimist, doesn’t see why teleportation isn’t conceivable. He mentions the recent laboratory successes with single-particle quantum tunneling. It’s just a matter of scaling up, he insists. I laugh, before remembering that we’re embarking on something that was once every bit as inconceivable. The idea of contributing to a vast, wiki-like public library of genetic research greatly appealed to me. But I couldn’t quite imagine putting my comprehensive genetic data—data that also belonged to my whole family—online. I could see how ordinary all this will one day become, how declaring whether you had the version of the APOE gene that correlates with late-onset Alzheimer’s might one day become as normal as slapping a pub shot up on your blog or discussing your Zoloft dosage at a dinner party. I just couldn’t bring myself to become one of the first dozen people to inhabit the place. I read the ood of media accounts, speculating about what will happen to our identities when the dust settles and we’re left with massive amounts of information gradually turning into actionable knowledge. On some days, in Illinois, waiting for my results, I imagine that my future doctor visits will feel more or less unchanged: _Am I dying? _Yes, but not yet. What should I do? Whatever you can. How long do I have? Not long. What happens next? Read it and weep.So what about the enormous majority of the genome with no known function? It turns out that much of those vast, mysterious tracts that used to be called “junk DNA” have been faithfully preserved over eons and seem to have gene-regulatory functions. I’m guessing that if those stretches are junk, they’re the kind of junk that will come down out of the attic to fetch big prices on Antiques Roadshow. These books for teens and young adults all feature lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender characters and relationships. Changes in the nucleotide sequence of a gene can change the structure and function of the protein it encodes, or they can change when and how much of the protein is made. These differences, sculpted by natural selection, result in all the variation of life, from bacteria to blue whales. The entire runaway experimental pyramiding scheme results from the differential field-testing and selecting of these garbled bits of code across billions of years. AFTER 2,000 MAN-HOURS and 9,000 supercomputer CPU hours, my genome is ready. I return to Boston in mid-August, this time staying at the old nineteenth-century Charles Street Jail, recently turned into a twenty-first-century luxury hotel: old inheritances transformed into new variations. When I eat with Conde and Kiirikki again, it’s in a new restaurant. It has to be: I have the novelty gene. They’re bursting with excitement, trying not to give away tomorrow’s show. Children love to explore, born with a boundless desire to understand the world around them. While most of the outside world has already been mapped, there’s a whole other world that has yet to be discovered, one that’s accessible only to them: their own minds.