LitMed: Literature Arts Medicine Database

Editing Humanity

Davies, Kevin

Last Updated: Jun-28-2022

Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Summary:

Editing Humanity explores the history, biology, sociology, and ethical import of CRISPR (“clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”), the major new DNA technology indicated in the book’s subtitle, “The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing.” Using CRISPR, researchers can manipulate the DNA of animals, plants and microorganisms with extremely high precision. In particular, scientists now have the potential to customize the human genome.

What is CRISPR? To quote Davies, “CRISPR is a small subsection of the bacterial genome that stores snippets of captured viral code for future reference, each viral fragment (or spacer) neatly separated by an identical repetitive DNA sequence.” (p. 23) When the cell is reattacked by a virus, an RNA copy of that virus’ stored “signature” forms a DNA-splitting complex that destroys the incoming virus. In 2012, Jennifer Doudna, of the University of California, Berkeley, and Emmanuelle Charpentier, of the Max Planck Institute, Berlin, demonstrated that CRISPR could be engineered to edit any gene. One could, for example, replace a disease-causing mutation in any DNA segment with the healthy variant, thus preventing genetic disease.

The author, Kevin Davies is a geneticist and science writer whose previous books include Cracking the Genome and DNA: The Story of the Genetic Revolution. In Editing Humanity, he discusses an array of actual and potential applications of CRISPR technology, including human disease prevention by altering susceptibility of animal vectors, improving farm productivity, and even resurrecting extinct species. However, the most powerful and controversial topic is genetic manipulation of the human embryo. Davies devotes several chapters to the cautionary tale of the young Chinese scientist He Jiankui who engineered the world’s first gene-edited babies, and the scandal and disgrace that followed. (He was convicted in China of “illegal medical practice” and sentenced to prison.)

View full annotation

Darwin's Hunch: Science, Race and the Search for Human Origins

Kuljian, Christa

Last Updated: Feb-14-2022

Olagun-Samuel, Christine

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: History

Summary:

Inspired by Stephen J. Gould’s study of Samuel Morton in The Mismeasure of Man, Christa Kuljian’s Darwin’s Hunch traces the story of the search for human origins while apartheid was taking hold of South Africa in the mid 20th century. Following the work of Charles Darwin, biologists and anthropologists of the 19th and 20th centuries were captivated by comparative anatomy, human classification, and the origins of mankind. Kuljian begins her book with the very origin of racialized thought in science: the distinction between monogenism and polygenism. These two schools of thought in the 18th and 19th centuries sought to explain the existence of human difference; the former arguing that all races stemmed from a single ancestor and the latter arguing that different races emanated from different species. Physicians and scientists were at the center of this discourse, creating names for different racial categories while debating whether races were different species in and of themselves. Eventually, well-known physicians and anthropologists created tools to measure anatomical differences between racial groups. Kuljian centers her book on the studies of the physicians and scientists who contributed to academic discourse, including Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Robert Bloom, Raymond Dart, Hertha DeVilliers, and Phillip Tobias among others.

In the search for the “missing link” between man and animal, South Africa became a living laboratory. Paleontologists, physicians, anthropologists and the like began a search for living fossils after the discovery of the Taung Skull by Raymond Dart. This discovery birthed the search for human origins in South Africa. For many scientists at the time, the living fossil was not only physical evidence of human evolution, but also supporting evidence for presupposed ideas about racial difference, and so “the most interesting specimens [became] the natives”. South African researchers like Robert Broom, Raymond Dart, and Phillip Tobias, among many others, began projects to study the anatomies of the Bantu, Khoikhoi, and other native people of South Africa. Some researchers embarked on expeditions to Bantustans, reserves that segregated the native population, and measured living native communities, others studied “skeletons from graves”, and still others examined “unclaimed bodies from South African hospitals”.

The focus of this work in many ways was also a search for a pure racial type. These studies aimed to quantify racial differences by measuring the “brain size, skull shape, facial features, skin colour, hair texture and bone length” of native people. Other studies were reminiscent of previous investigations of difference, such as the objectification of Sarah Baartman, in that “Dart gave special attention to the external genitalia… and the accumulation of fat on many of the females’ buttocks”.

Kuljian also traces the political history that coincides with this race for human origins by discussing the progression of the apartheid state of South Africa. Jan Smuts, who would later become Prime Minister of South Africa during the time of Dart’s early investigations, was also the president of the South African Association for the Advancement of Science which institutionally funded and supported the search for human origins. He continued supporting this research into his prime ministry, as increasingly “race [became] a national neurosis in South Africa”.

In this captivating look at the personal stories of researchers, their sociopolitical context, as well as the stories of the people they studied, Kuljian dives into the tension between personal beliefs and scientific practice. She examines how bias, politics, and institutions shaped investigations into the search for human origins.

View full annotation

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Harari, Yuval

Last Updated: Dec-17-2018

Field, Steven

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: History

Summary:

Yuval Noah Harari’s best-selling book “Sapiens” is subtitled “A Brief History of Humankind.” While this may seem to bespeak a bit of hubris—it would seem that 414 pages might be, despite the modifying adjective of the subtitle, a little too condensed to cover 2.5 million years (albeit only the last 70,000 or so in any kind of detail)—the impression after finishing is that he may have done it, or at least, done the effort proud. Mustering a combination of data and insights from the domains of history, archeology, genetics, biology, paleobiology, economics, and sociology, among others, Harari weaves an organized narrative that attempts to answer the questions of who we are and how we got here.

He divides the story into four assigned landmark periods in human history: The Cognitive Revolution (the earliest organization of humans into groups which evidence the use of tools and the beginnings of culture), The Agricultural Revolution (the impact of the learned ability to cultivate the land, with its shift from hunters and gatherers to farmers, and by necessity, from nomadic to settled tribes, and the beginnings of towns), The Unification of Humankind (the aggregation of people into larger groups and the emergence of money (and the earliest capitalism), religion, social expansion and conquest), and The Scientific Revolution (the development of science and the incredibly rapid acceleration of knowledge in the last five or six hundred years). The titles of the periods are, however, only guideposts, for the sections are broader in scope than simply farming or science. The section on the scientific revolution, for example, interweaves scientific progress with economics and imperialism (which are themselves interwoven, after all), religion, and philosophy. And that same section leads Harari to speculate, at the end, as to where the digital revolution and the development of artificial intelligence might be leading us and what we might say about our future as a species.

View full annotation

From Fish to Philosopher

Smith, Homer

Last Updated: May-17-2018

Thomas, Shawn

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Treatise

Summary:

Most students of biology are well aware of our humble beginnings as puny, single-celled lifeforms. The mechanism of our remarkable transformation was famously described by Charles Darwin in his groundbreaking text On the Origin of Species, published in 1859. In many respects, Darwin’s magnum opus was just the opening chapter of a much broader discussion of how we humans have taken our current form. Darwin elucidated only a general process of adaptation and evolution in the face of environmental pressures. He left his successors with the more onerous task of applying this rule to the tortuous history of human evolution.

Rising to the occasion nearly a full century later was Homer Smith, a prominent kidney physiologist who spent much of his life and career as the Director of Physiological Laboratories at the NYU School of Medicine. Dr. Smith shares his account of our evolutionary history in his 1953 book From Fish to Philosopher. In the book, he posits that organisms must have a system for maintaining a distinct “internal environment” in order to have any sense of freedom from the perennially dynamic external environment. He guides the reader through the various biological filtration devices that have come and gone over the eras, culminating with the fist-sized organs dangling next to our spines.

The book is often billed as a detailed treatise on how modern-day mammalian kidneys have arisen from their more primordial forms – a fair assessment, especially given the author’s background. But this book offers readers something much more ambitious in scope than a rehashing of his work in renal physiology. For example, the first chapter of the book, “Earth”, highlights geological milestones that molded the early environment of the first known lifeforms. In Dr. Smith’s words,

“the history of living organisms has been shaped at every turn by earth’s vicissitudes, because every geologic upheaval, by causing profound changes in the distribution of land and sea, has had profound effects on the climates of both, and hence of the patterns of life in both” (pp. 9).

By the final chapter, “Consciousness”, he has begun to ponder questions of metacognition and learning. He marvels at how our complex nervous system has allowed classical pianists to balance the rigidity required for technical prowess, and the fluidity required for creativity. This is not a textbook about our kidneys. From Fish to Philosopher is a story of mankind’s genesis, told through the existential musings of a physiologist who left no stone unturned.

View full annotation