Month: November 2021

During the holidays, I finished reading Carl Zimmer’s “She Has Her Mother’s Laugh”: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity.

The book is a masterpiece. It covers the genetic decline of the Habsburg empire, who Luther Burbank was and why he appears in one of Frida Kahlo’s pieces, the journey to Mendel’s laws, Darwin’s pangenesis hypothesis and his gemmules, the works of Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, August Weismann and the “Weismann barrier” (preventing the transfer of information about acquired changes to the germ cells), its overcoming by science, and how this perplexed scientists, the history of the Vineland Training School for developmentally challenged children, specifically the story of Emma Wolverton (soon described in books as Deborah Kallikak), and particularly the story of Henry Goddard, stories that marked the beginning of eugenics and the subsequent Nazi belief in the possibility of “improving people and the human race”, the history of eugenics in the USA, the story of Nobel laureate writer Pearl Buck and her daughter Carol who suffered from phenylketonuria, and the contributions that Vineland School, Pearl Buck, and Lionel Penrose made in defeating eugenics, how sometimes hereditary diseases can be easily treated if their nature is understood, about the discovery of DNA, about Chaplin and his attempt to prove non-paternity scientifically, about cases where DNA analysis can show that the real mother isn’t the mother and how this ties with the laws, about the mass of biologically controversial in the definition of races and the general division of people into similar categories, about chimeras, about giants and dwarfs, about heredity, about acromegaly (recalling Valuev), about the “missing heritability problem”, about twin studies (“Ed and Fred”), about the ethical problems of IVF, about microchimerism, about contagious cancer diseases, about Lamarckism and epigenetics, about how all the aforementioned is related to evolution, about how the human genome was sequenced, and how they learned to alter the genome “on demand”, the amazing fact that a child’s cells can overcome the placental barrier and live in the mother’s body, and then enter the body of a second child (cells of the older brother are found in the girl), about the CRISPR/Cas9 technology, Jennifer Doudna, and the experiments of He Jiankui…

This is only a small part. The book is riveting. Highly recommended. (You can easily find the EPUB/PDF online. I bought the book, which I also advise you to do)

Four and a half hours behind the wheel flew by unnoticed. “Compromise” is a collection of short stories about the daily life of a simple Soviet journalist, an alcoholic and a slacker. Dovlatov on the profession of journalism in that era. Cynically and with very soft humor

We’re heading home. Somewhere in a godforsaken place, two hours away from our village into the forest, at a gas station there’s a terminal for selling bitcoins (specifically, BTC, LTC, ETH). The ATM claims there are already over 3000 of them

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