David Nathan was stunned when he first saw Dayem Saif at Children's Hospital in Boston in September 1968. Dayem was then a six-year-old with the stature of an average-sized boy of two. He wore baby shoes on his tiny feet and was unable to walk without holding his mother's hand. His color was dark yet pasty and his face horribly misshapen. The child was being ravaged by thalassemia, a life-threatening inherited disease of the blood, and one of the leading causes of disfigurement, disability, and death in children worldwide. Without effective treatment, Dayem would almost certainly die before his twentieth birthday.

Genes, Blood, and Courage is David Nathan's absorbing story of the thirty-year struggle to keep Dayem alive. "Immortal Sword" is the English translation of Dayem's Arabic name, and under Nathan's care Dayem, indeed, seems immortal. Despite his continual reluctance to follow his doctor's orders and the repeated hospitalizations that result, Dayem--the misshapen, stunted boy--survives to become a handsome, successful businessman.

In Genes, Blood, and Courage Nathan goes beyond his struggles with this seemingly immortal patient to describe in detail the emergence, over the past twenty-five years, of an entirely new force in medical care called molecular medicine. As Dayem's case illustrates, this new area of human genetic research--in which Nathan is a leading clinical investigator--promises tremendous advances in the rational diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of inherited disorders, such as thalassemia and sickle cell anemia, and even of acquired illnesses such as cancer and infectious disease.

Genes, Blood, and Courage is a celebration not just of Dayem's triumphs but also of the tremendous accomplishments and potential of the American biomedical research enterprise in the late twentieth century.

In evolution, most genes survive and spread within populations because they increase the ability of their hosts (or their close relatives) to survive and reproduce. But some genes spread in spite of being harmful to the host organism—by distorting their own transmission to the next generation, or by changing how the host behaves toward relatives. As a consequence, different genes in a single organism can have diametrically opposed interests and adaptations.Covering all species from yeast to humans, Genes in Conflict is the first book to tell the story of selfish genetic elements, those continually appearing stretches of DNA that act narrowly to advance their own replication at the expense of the larger organism. As Austin Burt and Robert Trivers show, these selfish genes are a universal feature of life with pervasive effects, including numerous counter-adaptations. Their spread has created a whole world of socio-genetic interactions within individuals, usually completely hidden from sight.Genes in Conflict introduces the subject of selfish genetic elements in all its aspects, from molecular and genetic to behavioral and evolutionary. Burt and Trivers give us access for the first time to a crucial area of research—now developing at an explosive rate—that is cohering as a unitary whole, with its own logic and interconnected questions, a subject certain to be of enduring importance to our understanding of genetics and evolution.

The mystery of inheritance has captivated thinkers since antiquity, and the unlocking of this mystery—the development of classical genetics—is one of humanity’s greatest achievements. This great scientific and human drama is the story told fully and for the first time in this book.

Acclaimed science writer James Schwartz presents the history of genetics through the eyes of a dozen or so central players, beginning with Charles Darwin and ending with Nobel laureate Hermann J. Muller. In tracing the emerging idea of the gene, Schwartz deconstructs many often-told stories that were meant to reflect glory on the participants and finds that the “official” version of discovery often hides a far more complex and illuminating narrative. The discovery of the structure of DNA and the more recent advances in genome science represent the culmination of one hundred years of concentrated inquiry into the nature of the gene. Schwartz’s multifaceted training as a mathematician, geneticist, and writer enables him to provide a remarkably lucid account of the development of the central ideas about heredity, and at the same time bring to life the brilliant and often eccentric individuals who shaped these ideas.

In the spirit of the late Stephen Jay Gould, this book offers a thoroughly engaging story about one of the oldest and most controversial fields of scientific inquiry. It offers readers the background they need to understand the latest findings in genetics and those still to come in the search for the genetic basis of complex diseases and traits.

This book is an introduction to Intercultural Communication (IC) that takes into account the much neglected dynamic paradigm of culture in the literature. It posits that culture is not static, context is the driving force for change, and individuals can develop a multicultural mind.It is also the first IC textbook in the field that incorporates insight from evolutionary biology and the newly emerging discipline of culturalneurosciences. Such an interdisciplinary approach provides readers with new angles, encourages critical thinking, and sometimes challenges conventional knowledge in the field. The combination of the author's multiculturalacademic and journalistic background contributes to a balance of diverse perspectives and world views on cultural theories and discourses. The book is ideal for courses in Intercultural Communicationwith study cases, discussion topics and class activities.

At a time when the complete human genome has been sequenced and when seemingly every week feature news stories describe genes that may be responsible for personality, intelligence, even happiness, Michel Morange gives us a book that demystifies the power of modern genetics. The Misunderstood Gene takes us on an easily comprehensible tour of the most recent findings in molecular biology to show us how—and if—genes contribute to biological processes and complex human behaviors.

As Morange explains, if molecular biologists had to designate one category of molecules as essential to life, it would be proteins and their multiple functions, not DNA and genes. Genes are the centerpiece of modern biology because they can be modified. But they are only the memory that life invented so that proteins could be efficiently reproduced. Morange shows us that there is far more richness and meaning in the structure and interactions of proteins than in all the theoretical speculations on the role of genes.

The Misunderstood Gene makes it clear that we do not have to choose between rigid genetic determinism and fearful rejection of any specific role for genes in development or behavior. Both are true, but at different levels of organization. Morange agrees with those who say “we are not in our genes.” But he also wants us to understand that we are not without our genes, either. We are going to have to make do with them, and this book will show us how.

An award-winning biologist and writer applies queer feminist theory to developmental genetics, arguing that individuals are not essentially male or female.  
 
The idea that gender is a performance—a tenet of queer feminist theory since the nineties—has spread from college classrooms to popular culture. This transformative concept has sparked reappraisals of social expectations as well as debate over not just gender, but sex: what it is, what it means, and how we know it. Most scientific and biomedical research over the past seventy years has assumed and reinforced a binary concept of biological sex, though some scientists point out that male and female are just two outcomes in a world rich in sexual diversity.   
 
In Performance All the Way Down, MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist Richard O. Prum brings feminist thought into conversation with biology, arguing that the sexual binary is not essential to human genes, chromosomes, or embryos. Our genomes are not blueprints, algorithms, or recipes for the physical representation of our individual sexual essences or fates. In accessible language, Prum shows that when we look closely at the science, we see that gene expression is a material action in the world, a performance through which the individual regulates and achieves its own becoming. A fertilized zygote matures into an organism with tissues and organs, neurological control, immune defenses, psychological mechanisms, and gender and sexual behavior through a performative continuum. This complex hierarchy of self-enactment reflects the evolved agency of individual genes, molecules, cells, and tissues.
 
Rejecting the notion of an intractable divide between the humanities and the sciences, Prum proves that the contributions of queer and feminist theorists can help scientists understand the human body in new ways, yielding key insights into genetics, developmental biology, physiology. Sure to inspire discussion, Performance All the Way Down is a book about biology for feminists, a book about feminist theory for biologists, and a book for anyone curious about how our sexual bodies grow.

Nearly four decades ago Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene, famously reducing humans to “survival machines” whose sole purpose was to preserve “the selfish molecules known as genes.” How these selfish genes work together to construct the organism, however, remained a mystery. Standing atop a wealth of new research, The Society of Genes now provides a vision of how genes cooperate and compete in the struggle for life.

Pioneers in the nascent field of systems biology, Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher present a compelling new framework to understand how the human genome evolved and why understanding the interactions among our genes shifts the basic paradigm of modern biology. Contrary to what Dawkins’s popular metaphor seems to imply, the genome is not made of individual genes that focus solely on their own survival. Instead, our genomes comprise a society of genes which, like human societies, is composed of members that form alliances and rivalries.

In language accessible to lay readers, The Society of Genes uncovers genetic strategies of cooperation and competition at biological scales ranging from individual cells to entire species. It captures the way the genome works in cancer cells and Neanderthals, in sexual reproduction and the origin of life, always underscoring one critical point: that only by putting the interactions among genes at center stage can we appreciate the logic of life.