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    The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine
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    The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine
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    The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine
    Ebook425 pages6 hours

    The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine

    By Francis S. Collins

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    "His groundbreaking work has changed the very ways we consider our health and examine disease.” —Barack Obama

    From Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institute of Health, 2007 recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and 15-year head of the Human Genome Project, comes one of the most important medical books of the year: The Language of Life. With accessible, insightful prose, Dr. Collins describes the medical, scientific, and genetic revolution that is currently unlocking the secrets of “personalized medicine,” and offers practical advice on how to utilize these discoveries for you and your family’s current and future health and well-being. In the words of Dr. Jerome Groopman (How Doctors Think), The Language of Life “sets out hope without hype, and will enrich the mind and uplift the heart.”

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateFeb 16, 2010
    ISBN9780061963490
    Author

    Francis S. Collins

    Francis S. Collins is one of the country's leading geneticists and the longtime head of the Human Genome Project. Prior to coming to Washington, he helped to discover the genetic misspellings that cause cystic fibrosis, neurofibromatosis, and Huntington's disease. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland, and in his spare time he enjoys riding a motorcycle and playing guitar.

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    Reviews for The Language of Life

    4.5/5

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    • 4/5
      My employer (Vanderbilt University Medical Center) is the world's leader in implementing the ideas around personalized medicine, so I picked up this audiobook to educate me on what's going on around me while I drove to and from work. In it, I found interesting stories from patients combined with weighty data from the human genome.

      Collins maintains a warm bedside manner as well as a writer as he does as a researcher, NIH leader, and physician. His homespun manner makes his writing relatable and engaging. It is obvious that he cares about patients as the center of all his work - a nice trait for a driven, big-time researcher to have.

      The science described in this book continued trends I sensed while I was a medical student. The question of who-has-what-genes will likely guide science for the better part of my life. Collins engages these questions with the latest (as of the time of his writing) science has to offer. Genetics is indeed a fun field to follow.

      Genetics opens up a whole host of research and ethical questions that is currently engaging us as a society. Is gene therapy (which surely is coming) ethical? To what extent do genomics play God? And to what extent are our genes reflections on our experience as much as our heredity? Is religion going to play the role of being merely against technology or will it sublimate itself to aid healing? What will the medical clinic look like in 2050? Also, what will the birth process (and the electronic medical record) look like in 2050?

      Collins' book is a good primer to these issues. Listening to it has been a joy for the past couple of weeks.