Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene »

MASHA GESSEN is a journalist who has written for Slate, Seed, the New Republic, the New York Times, and other publications, and is the author of two previous books. She lives in Moscow.

In 2004 genetic testing revealed that Masha Gessen had a mutation that predisposed her to ovarian and breast cancer. The discovery initiated Gessen into a club of sorts: the small (but exponentially expanding) group of people in possession of a new and different way of knowing themselves through what is inscribed in the strands of their DNA. As she wrestled with a wrenching personal decision—what to do with such knowledge—Gessen explored the landscape of this brave new world, speaking with medical experts, religious thinkers, historians, and others facing genetic disorders.

Blood Matters is a much needed field guide to this unfamiliar and unsettling territory. It explores the way genetic information is shaping the decisions we make, not only about our physical and emotional health but about whom we marry, the children we bear, even the personality traits we long to have. And it helps us come to terms with the radical transformation that genetic information is engineering in our most basic sense of who we are and what we might become.

The New York Times - Jennifer Senior

While it was Gessen's misfortune to have inherited her mother's cruel mutation, it was her good luck—and ours—that she also inherited her mother's storytelling grace and critical dexterity (Yolka Gessen was a writer and a translator). Blood Matters is valuable reading to almost anyone facing a huge health decision, not only for the literary commiseration it offers, but also for the inspired example of medical sleuthing on one's own behalf that it provides. Gessen keeps an inflammatory topic at room temperature, writing elegantly and without self-pity. The book is very funny in places…It's also very lucid, even when the science gets complex. It's a liberating book. Strange as it sounds, it would make a great Mother's Day present.

Part 1 The Past

1 My Mother's Fatal Flaw 3

2 The Four Mothers of Jewsp15

3 The Post-Nazi Era 57

Part 2 The Present

4 Indecision 71

5 A Decision at Any Cost 78

6 The Father of Hereditary Cancers 117

7 The Cruelest Disease 139

8 The Science of Matchmaking 166

9 The Operation 191

Part 3 The Future

10 The Future the Old-Fashioned Way 199

11 Biobabble 238

12 What We Fear Most 264

Acknowledgments 283

Glossary of Key Terms 285

Notes on Sources 289

Index 309