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

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As I disembark and stroll down the mobbed concourse at O’Hare with my genome in my ight bag, I get a ash of how genes in endless combination, shaped by nothing but natural selection, have propelled life from bacterial automata to big brains, from int shards and pointed sticks to genomics. The personal genome is one more tentative step from fate to agency, from fatalism to risk management. The Boston skyline, so changed since my days here, still preserves the ghosts of its prior incarnations, from the Citgo sign to the Old South Meeting House. I go back to the hotel and lie in bed reading the Knome consent form, which I must sign before the blood drawing tomorrow morning. 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.

Proud of Me | BookTrust Proud of Me | BookTrust

On other days, it strikes me that we’re entering a new stage of commoditized medicine, complete with new markets for converting knowledge into cash, risk into responsibility.I sit there browsing my genome, exploring the sequences that correlate with stress, athleticism, brain function, longevity. After dinner, on my walk back up the hill to the hotel, I wonder if we are prepared to live so intimately with our genetic risks and trait dispositions, whether we’re really ready to send our inheritance oating out so promiscuously for interpretation in the burgeoning informational space of genetic discovery. The entire runaway experimental pyramiding scheme results from the differential field-testing and selecting of these garbled bits of code across billions of years. For a very long time, we have been moving from scripted characters to the co-authors of our own lives. The next morning, I’m at the Harvard Club in the Back Bay, a place I always wanted to spy into but never did until now.

The Book of Me: A Do-It-Yourself Memoir (Notebook, Diary)

We’ll once again change our relations to chance and choice—another evolution in human consciousness that we’ll feel only for a short time, before it too goes normal. I feel strangely shaky after that announcement, realizing what a different article this would have been if I had. 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.

I have nine genetic variants associated with increased risk of colorectal cancer, but ten associated with decreased risk. To get a copy of my full catalog of inheritance, I will y in three days to Boston, a town where, long ago, I began my adult life, worked my first job, and wrote my first novel. I like invention, and if you can start inventing the way you invent and inventing the ways that you distribute and inventing the ways that you educate, and if all these things are subject to invention, then we’ve got a very interesting few decades ahead of us.