Masha Gessen, who visits this coming Thursday, writes candidly about her genetic history and her painful decision to have a double mastectomy after discovering that she is predestined to develop a fatal form of breast cancer.
Jennifer Senior reviews her 2008 book Blood Matters in the New York Times.
"One of the wonders of the genome is how it enables us to time-travel, both backward and forward. Scribbled within it are clues to our ancestry, which can give us an emboldening sense of continuity, coherence, place — how marvelous to imagine ourselves the sons of Levi, the daughters of African queens! But scrawled within it, too, are clues about our future, which can be downright terrifying. Rather than expand our sense of possibilities, they foreshorten them. There are dread mutations slumbering in our cells. From our genes, we learn how we may die." More.
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Masha Gessen: Declaring War on Her Own Body
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Masha Gessen: Breasts Old and New
Masha Gessen, who visits 3/8, wrote an extraordinary series of articles for Slate in 2004 in advance of undergoing a double mastectomy in 2005 after discovering that she possessed a genetic mutation that predisposed her to a deadly form of breast cancer.
"All of this abstract talk about breasts—other women's breasts, breasts in general—is of limited application when I am trying to think about cutting off my own. So, it's time for full disclosure. For years, other people liked my breasts more than I did. The usual pubescent discomfort with a changing body lasted longer for me than it does for many women: I thought my breasts were too large, and, looking androgynous and liking it, I didn't particularly enjoy having breasts. Over the years, as I got into better shape, they actually got a bit smaller...." More.
A fuller discussion of her experiences (before and after) is presented in her book, Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene (2008).
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Fast Forward to the Year 2100....
"Fast-forward to the year 2100. Computers, writes physicist and futurist Michio Kaku [who visits 2/21] in Physics of the Future (Doubleday, 2011), will have humanlike intelligence, the Internet will be accessible via contact lenses, nanobots will eliminate cancers, space tourism will be cheap and popular, and we’ll be colonizing Mars.
We will be a planetary civilization capable of consuming the 1017 watts of solar energy falling on Earth to meet our energy needs, with the Internet as a worldwide telephone system; English and Chinese as the contenders for a planetary language; a unified culture of common foods, fashions and films; and a truly global economy with many more international trading blocs such as we see today in the European Union and NAFTA.
Kaku’s vision of how the exchange of science, technology and ideas among all peoples will create a global civilization with greatly weakened nation-states and almost no war is epic in its scope and heroic in its inspiration."
Read more in Scientific American. Visit the Institute schedule for details of Kaku's visit.