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Mutants: On the Form, Varieties and Errors of the Human Body

By (author) Armand Marie Leroi






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How we grow; and what happens when mistakes occur Mutants is a book about how the body develops and grows from a single cell to an adult and then declines into old age. What does the new molecular genetics tell us about the human condition? How is a limb formed? Why do we have five fingers (and not six)? What controls the size to which we grow? Why do we age? More than this, however, it is a brilliant narrative history of what happens when things go wrong. This book tells, rather like a biological verison of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, the stories of particularly historically important and bizarre cases: of a French convent girl of the last century who found herself changing sex upon puberty and her miserable fate in the gutters of Paris; of children, invariably stillborn, who have cylopia (one eye located beneath their nasal cavity); of a tribe of pygmies in the Andaman Islands and a village of Ecuadorian dwarves: of a remarkably hairy family who were kept at the Burmese Royal Court for four generations (and from whom Darwin took one of his keenest insights into heredity); and so on. From each important lessons are drawn that illustrate over and over again the amazing nature of cellular growth and how it works.

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Normally shipped | Enquiries only
Publisher | HarperCollins Publishers
Published date | 4 May 2004
Language |
Format | Paperback
Pages | 320
Dimensions | 216 x 135 x 0mm (L x W x H)
Weight | 548g
ISBN | 978-0-0071-8457-6
Readership Age |
BISAC | science / life sciences / biology / general


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