Summary Of Genome By Matt Ridely

From the title of this book, I realized that this book would be interesting to read. The author’s approach to explaining the human genome was indeed erratic and unprecedented. The author, Matt Ridely, thought about the human genome as a sort of an autobiography its own record of showing the history of our human species and ancestors from the very first start of life. Thus, he used all 23 different chromosomes and used one of the related genes to write themes of human nature. He emphasized the fact that knowing and learning about our human genome is very important as these knowledges would help us, human beings to revolutionize anthropology, psychology, medicine, paleontology and virtually every other science. However, he denied the fact that

He assumed this book as a genome. Genome is the haploid set of chromosomes in a gamete or microorganism, or in each cell of a multicellular organism. Chromosome is packaged and organized into chromatin, and chromatin is the strands of DNA wrapping around histones. So, the description above was over explained, but the point that I wanted to deliver was that he used the chapters as chromosomes. Matt said “There are total 23 chapters in this book, and each chapter contains several thousand stories, called genes”. He further compared the book with the human genome and it is remarkable. Each story is made up of paragraphs called exons, which are interrupted by advertisements called introns. Each paragraph is made up of words, called codons and each word is written in letters called Bases. As you can tell from these description and comparison of books to genomes, Matt truly believes in an idea that the comparison is not just a metaphor but a fact. So now, let’s talk briefly about the few chapters of Chromosomes that were very interesting to

In this chapter, Matt stated that individual’s health does not only depends on the human genome, but the brain, body and the genome are all involved in determining one’s health. The gene responsible in Chromosome 10 is CYP17, which enables the body to convert cholesterol into cortisol, testosterone and estradiol. The body’s response to the stress that we get is simply the release of the genes above. The results of the release of those genes are switching on and off including suppressing the immune system. One of the specific example regarding the human body is the heart disease. It has shown to be linked very highly to the amount of daily cortisol level in the bloodstream, which correlates to daily stress level and feeling of control. Other example is a study found from comparing two people with different paying jobs; lower paying and ranking jobs expressed higher risk of heart