Welcome to the Genome: A User's Guide to the Genetic Past, Present, and Future

A thrilling "user's guide" to the genomics era

Welcome to the genome, the miraculous blueprint of your DNA, coiled tight as a spring in the nucleus of each cell of your body. If unwound, the DNA from just one cell, while only a molecule in width, would stretch six feet in length! The information stored in its double helix structure - three billion bits worth - could fill 142 Manhattan phone books.

Yet far more amazing than these facts is the impact the study of genomics has had on so many areas of our lives. From the promise of personalized medicine and gene therapy to disputes over the safety of genetically modified (GM) foods, there is little doubt we are in the midst of the Genomic Revolution. Now how do we make sense of it all?

Welcome to the Genome takes you right into the thick of today's most cutting-edge science and its far-reaching implications. Authors Rob DeSalle, who curated the highly successful Genomics Revolution exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and Michael Yudell, Assistant Professor of Public Health at Drexel University, have written a book which clearly explains the ongoing saga of our attempts to understand the mystery of biology's Rosetta Stone and use its code to better our lives.

This reader-friendly book employs an understandable style and eye-popping full-color illustrations to provide real insights into the complex science involved. It delves into the past discoveries that led to the sequencing of the human genome; it presents the challenges facing today's scientists and society and culture in general; and it considers the future possibilities of the developing genome era. Social issues, particularly questions of ethics, receive special attention, covering an important area too often overshadowed by science and technology.

If the genome really is the book of life, then we have only just opened to the first of its many pages. Those who triumphantly claim DNA is destiny may have spoken too soon; it is far more likely today's discoveries will lead to insights yet to be imagined. A stirring and informative introduction to a scientific epic still unfolding, Welcome to the Genome is an essential guide for understanding - and participating in - the incredible explorations, discussions, and realizations of the Genomic Revolution.

 

Stories of Mr. Keuner

Stories of Mr. Keuner gathers Bertolt Brecht's fictionalized comments on politics, everyday life, and exile. Written from the late 1920s till the late 1950s, Stories of Mr. Keuner is the precipitate of Brecht's experience of a world in political and cultural flux, a world of revolution, civil war, world war, cultural efflorescence, Nazism, Stalinism, and the Cold War – in short, the first half of the twentieth century.

Mr. Keuner said: "I, too, once adopted an aristocratic stance (you know: erect, upright, and proud, head thrown back). I was standing in rising water at the time. I adopted this posture when it rose to my chin."

"At first, they appear almost innocuous, these so-called stories, anecdotal fragments often of a single page or less. Brecht's scenarios seem so simple, his style so direct. He expressly wished what he wrote to be useful. Here he succeeded brilliantly: These pieces are small enough to be carried away whole, but what they say is big enough to be equal to the reader." —Johnathon Keats, SF Gate

"Stories of Mr. Keuner finally puts in English translation this startling and stunning body of work, not only encouraging a broader appreciation of a playwright famed for fighting inhumanity in his time, but also effectively questioning integrity in our own day." —San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"The first English translation of the great playwright’s discursive semifictionalized observations on German life and politics, as spoken by the eponymous Keuner (his name from the German "keiner," meaning "no man"), a "thinking man" obviously inspired by Plato’s Socrates. Written between the 1920s and ‘50s (and collected for the first publication in 1956, the year of Brecht’s death), they’re brief (often single-paragraph) aperçus generally employed to deflate contemporary pretensions regarding religion, patriotism, capitalism, exile, and other themes engaged more fully in their author’s celebrated poems and plays (e.g., "I am for justice; so it’s good if the place in which I’m staying has more than one exit"), but most effectively adumbrated in this revealing coda to an indisputably major, and still challenging, body of work." —Kirkus Reviews

Bertolt Brecht wrote The Threepenny Opera, Mahagonny, Mother Courage, The Life of Galileo, and many other plays, poems, and theoretical writings. Ardent antifascist, friend to Walter Benjamin, and wily ally of the COmmunists, Brecht was often on the run, "changing countries more than shoes." As Hitler's armies advanced, Brecht fled to Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and the U.S. before finally settling in East Germany after the war, where he became director of the renowned Berliner Ensemble.

Martin Chalmers (1948-2014) had translated works by Victor Klemperer, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Hubert Fichte, and Elfriede Jelinek, among others. Mr. Chalmers lived in London, where he wrote extensively on German literature, film, history, and culture