Human Genetic Engineering

Stepping effortlessly from myth to cutting-edge science, Mutants gives a brilliant narrative account of our genetic code and the captivating people whose bodies have revealed it - a French convent girl who found herself changing sex at puberty; children who, echoing Homer's Cyclops, are born with a single eye in the middle of their foreheads; a village of long-lived Croatian dwarves; one family, whose bodies were entirely covered with hair, was kept at the Burmese royal court for four generations and gave Darwin one of his keenest insights into heredity.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this story, you can help me more than you know. A short review — even just a sentence — makes a huge difference and helps new readers discover the book. It only takes 10 seconds: ✔ Click “Write a review” ✔ Say what you liked ✔ Submit Your support keeps me writing. Thank you — Ted “They came for our DNA. We gave them our future.” In Tall Whites: The Pack, a cosmic conspiracy explodes into terrifying reality. Beneath deserts and city streets, alien-human hybrid experiments twist the boundaries of flesh and soul. A single handshake ...

The modern classic of space opera that began with Children of Time continues in this extraordinary novel of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet. Earth failed. In a desperate bid to escape, the spaceship Enkidu and its captain, Heorest Holt, carried its precious human cargo...

In this groundbreaking work, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for history's broadest patterns. It is a story that spans 13,000 years of human history, beginning when Stone Age hunter-gatherers constituted the entire human population. Guns, Germs, and Steel is a world history that really is a history of all the world's peoples, a unified narrative of human life.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Celebrated futurist Ray Kurzweil, hailed by Bill Gates as “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence,” presents an “elaborate, smart, and persuasive” (The Boston Globe) view of the future course of human development...

Evolutionary theory has long established that humans are animals: Modern Homo sapiens are primates who share an ancestor with monkeys and other great apes. Our genome is 98 percent identical to a chimpanzee's. And yet we think of ourselves as exceptional. Are we? In this original and entertaining tour of life on Earth, Adam Rutherford explores the profound paradox of the "human animal".

Human life, and how we came to be, is one of the greatest scientific and philosophical questions of our time. This compact and accessible book presents a modern view of human evolution. Written by a leading authority, it lucidly and engagingly explains not only the evolutionary process, but the technologies currently used to unravel the evolutionary past and emergence of Homo sapiens.

The astonishing sequel to Children of Time, the award-winning novel of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet. Thousands of years ago, Earth's terraforming program took to the stars. On the world they called Nod, scientists discovered alien life -- but it was their mission to...

I’m just one of the many experiments born and bred in the Ark; a secret government facility that's been playing God with the DNA of both human and animals, creating brand new species right under everybody's nose. The 'Broken', as we've been dubbed, have been genetically spliced with predators in the hopes of forming the perfect army. What we’re meant to be fighting for, however, is anyone’s guess. But what use is a Broken Faun? Within the walls of the compound, I’m nothing. Vulnerable. One of the few prey, surrounded by those created and trained to go right for the throat without an...

Some 73,000 years ago, the Mount Toba supervolcano in toda's Indonesia erupted, releasing the energy of a million tons of explosives. So much ash and debris was injected into the stratosphere that it partially blocked the sun's radiation and caused global temperatures to drop for a decade. In this book, Donald R. Prothero presents the controversial argument that the Toba catastrophe nearly wiped out the human race, leaving only about a thousand to ten thousand breeding pairs of humans worldwide.

When ancient Mesopotamian code becomes the blueprint for humanity's future, one hacker must decode the past to save the present. In the neon-drenched sprawl of Neo-Babylon, elite hacker Zara discovers something impossible: a corporate encryption system built on four-thousand-year-old Sumerian cuneiform. But these aren't just historical artifacts—they're executable code, functional algorithms written in clay by a civilization that shouldn't have possessed such knowledge. Teaming with disgraced archaeologist Dr. Roya Tehrani, Zara awakens a planetary management AI that has slumbered for ...

How do you tell your part in the biggest tale in history? I ask because it's what I have to do. I'm Zoe Boutin Perry: A colonist stranded on a deadly pioneer world. Holy icon to a race of aliens. A player (and a pawn) in a interstellar chess match to save humanity, or to see it fall. Witness to...

The world is in crisis! What is the solution? Ultimately, we have to find the redeeming, and thus transforming, understanding of our psychologically troubled human condition. And it is precisely that dreamed-of insight, and its now desperately needed transformation of our lives, that Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith presents in this book.

Once, we humans could only observe evolution. Suddenly, we had conquered it. And yet, in Life as We Made It, evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro argues that - despite how amazing our new technologies are - our ability to alter the course of evolution isn’t new. What is new is that where once we shaped evolution through brute force, we can now do it as artisans. That power comes not a moment too soon. If we are going to survive in the next few centuries, we must revise the book of life.

In our unique genomes, every one of us carries the story of our species - births, deaths, disease, war, famine, migration, and a lot of sex. But those stories have always been locked away - until now. Who are our ancestors? Where did they come from? Geneticists have suddenly become historians, and the hard evidence in our DNA has completely upended what we thought we knew about ourselves. Acclaimed science writer Adam Rutherford explains exactly how genomics is completely rewriting the human story - from 100,000 years ago to the present.

Ever since Darwin and The Descent of Man, the existence of humans has been attributed to our intelligence and adaptability. But in Catching Fire, renowned primatologist Richard Wrangham presents a startling alternative: our evolutionary success is the result of cooking. In a groundbreaking theory of our origins, Wrangham shows that the shift from raw to cooked foods was the key factor in human evolution.

Imagine, if you can, the world in the year 2100. In Physics of the Future, Michio Kaku—the New York Times bestselling author of Physics of the Impossible—gives us a stunning, provocative, and exhilarating vision of the coming century based on interviews with over three hundred of the...

A fascinating investigation of the origin of humans based on incredible new discoveries and advanced scientific technology.

Why can humans alone invent? In The Pattern Seekers, Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen makes a case that autism is as crucial to our creative and cultural history as the mastery of fire. Indeed, Baron-Cohen argues that autistic people have played a key role in human progress for 70,000 years, from the first tools to the digital revolution. How? Because the same genes that cause autism enable the pattern seeking that is essential to our species' inventiveness.

Dr. Carl Sagan takes us on a great adventure, offering his vivid and startling insight into the brain of man and beast, the origin of human intelligence, the function of our most haunting legends - and their amazing links to recent discoveries.