Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body

by Armand Marie Leroi

Mutants gives a brilliant narrative account of our genetic code and the captivating people whose bodies have revealed it--a French convent girl who found herself changing sex at puberty; children who, echoing Homer's Cyclops, are born with a single eye in the middle of their foreheads; a village of long-lived Croatian dwarves; one family, whose bodies were entirely covered with hair, was kept at the Burmese royal court for four generations and gave Darwin one of his keenest insights into heredity. This elegant, humane, and engaging book "captures what we know of the development of what makes us human" (Nature).

Visit Armand Marie Leroi on the web: http: //armandleroi.com/index.htmlStepping effortlessly from myth to cutting-edge science,

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Biology, Medicine, History, Medical, Genetics

448 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Etta Mo · Rating 5 out of 5]

i've now read this book twice and all i can say is that leroi has a rare skill; he is able to present dense scientific facts in a way that borders on poetic. his fascination with genetics is apparent in the loving detail with which he writes. i particularly loved the way he started each section with a tale from the annals of history, giving a very personal voice to each of the "disorders" he describes.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took a little while to get into this book. What I thought would be the most interesting mutations - like conjoined twins - were actually the least, which is perhaps why the author chose to put that chapter first. Honestly, the most compelling studies were of things that are not as obvious mutations, like size, skin color or aging. The scientific jargon can get a little intense at times, but it eases up as the book continues, and is worth slogging through. The author treats the subject manner with true humanity - managing to really present cases and histories without seeming exploitative, and explaining not only the what, but truly the why.

I can't explain it, but somewhere along the way this book completely hooked and invaded my mind. It changed the way that I looked and thought about things around me. I'm not sure if there's a tangible explanation. This book is just elegant. It makes you realize the beauty and delicacy of the human genome.

[Lo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Trigger warnings!

There are some things in here that aren't in your average book on genetics, so I'm going to make a little list of things to watch out for if you read this. If I've missed anything, let me know and I'll add it. The book as a whole is not offensive at all, see my note after the list.

- fetal development and ways it can go wrong... This is discussed AT LENGTH, and it's not a bad thing, but I could imagine this being a TERRIBLE read if you're pregnant or have been lately.

- discussion of research done on animals... It's not condoned by the author necessarily, but I can picture some of my vegan friends being really upset by some of the details of surgery on fetal rabbits or the many, many things done to mice to advance understanding of genetics.

- super squeamish people will find parts of this uncomfortable, and there are a few disturbing photos... the absolute minimum of this is included, it's much less sensational than any other "cabinet of curiosities" type work, and the cool things you learn make it worthwhile. It's much less intense than a trip to the Mutter museum. But there were a couple of points where even I thought "oh, god, that's... ugh," and I am not easily grossed out. When I was 12, I asked a doctor if I could have local anesthetic and watch my own wrist surgery.

- racial stuff... handled in a pretty classy way by the author, but anything that discusses the history of genetics research is going to include some uncomfortable moments. This includes brief Nazi stuff, and other historical "people did that to PEOPLE?" moments.

The most impressive thing about this book (to me, but there are many positive qualities on display) is how the author includes anything that will further the text, but nothing else. If I wrote this, there would be way too many digressions about the life stories of the "mutants" and scientists involved and it'd be an Erik Larson style 700 pages. If most scientists wrote this, it probably wouldn't include such a diversity of research and case studies and/or be so clear and plainly but eloquently written. Rarely is opinion mentioned, which is refreshing in writing on genetics; Nazi experiments on siblings, however, are appropriately called out as horrifying. It's impressive that this can be so illuminating and provocative without offending.

As for what's great about this book, I hardly know where to begin. You'd be better served by reading it than the lengthy thoughts it inspired. If you read it on its own, you will find it fascinating if at times a little dry, and you will learn a lot about how genes make people. If, on the other hand, you have a background studying biology, evolution, genetics, biochemistry, or related fields, you will find it connects lots of dots and illuminates a big picture in a really satisfying way. Or at least, that was my experience. And if you make a habit of reading pop books about biology and science, you will probably (like most people here) be amazed how well crafted it is compared to anything like it.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

All my life, I have groaned inside (and sometimes outside) whenever someone spoke about the "miracle" of giving birth. How miraculous is it, I would ask cynically (and overly confident of my cleverness), if flies and jellyfish do it? In fact, it's only one of the most basic functions living organisms perform, along with eating and pooping. After reading this book, however, and learning about so many things that can happen during gestation that will render the fetus unviable, I am truly amazed, first, that organisms are born with such basic similarities to other members of their species and, second, that they are born at all. I must admit that reproduction is, indeed, miraculous. Don't get me wrong, my horror at pregnancy has not lessened, especially after reading about the coat of hair fetuses grow at five months and then shed a few weeks later. (And I thought defecating while trying to push the fetus out was horrifying!)

Read more . . .

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Near the end of this book the author pulls out the quote per molto variare la natur e bella--Nature's beauty is its variety--and it could be a motto for the book itself. Given that most of the book is about the human body developing dramatic abnormalities, usually during development, beauty is an odd word. I found some accounts difficult to read. But the ability for human biology to survive and sometimes prosper in so many different forms was just amazinga.

The book is a discussion of various conditions that have very visible effects--dwarfism, giantism, Siamese twins, people with no hands or feet, people with hands and feet but no arms and legs, people covered with more hair than Chewbacca, and so on. Some are fatal at birth, some at a young age, but most are not. A surprising (to me) number of people founded lines still prospering today--so a Chinese sailor missing the top his skull and clavicles founded a line that has several hundred descendants with the same symptoms.

If the existence of a whole family sharing such an unusual trait makes you wonder if scientists can do some sort of genetic analysis and figure something out about how genes interact with the body, well, answering that is the book's main concern. (Spoiler alert: Yes.) Most of the discussion is on gene expression and signalling pathways, in more detail than I expected. I'd call it roughly a Scientific American level of discussion. I'm not well qualified to judge the scientific soundness but in the small number of cases I knew anything at all Leroi seems to have done a good job presenting both conclusions and uncertainty.

The title--presumably picked by the publisher--is misleading though, as many problems are teratogenic or even nutritional and hove nothing to do with genetics. (Thalidomide and iodine deficiency induced issues, for example.) I don't begrudge "Mutant" for eye catching value but throwing in "genetic" in the subhead continues the annoying trend in popular science writing of implying everything biological is genetic.

[Peacegal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Those expecting a real-life version of "Mondo Freaks"--the book that caused so much disaster for the characters on the TV comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm--won't get that here. This is a scientific, and generally respectful, look at the many genetic variances that can occur when human and animal bodies are developing. Some mutations are devastating to the individual, others are beneficial, and many more don't affect the carrier's survival or abilities at all.

MUTANTS is drier and more jargon-filled than some of the pop-sci books that have become popular in later years, so casual readers may struggle with some of it. There is some distressing content, too, as our species has not always been the most welcoming to anyone deemed different from the norm, to say the least. I was also saddened by the considerable amount of descriptions of animal experiments, often highly invasive, to inflict destructive mutations on a huge variety of species. Some of these tests didn't appear to be motivated out of a desire to cure a condition, but rather out of simple curiosity with more than a dash of sadism.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5/5


This is one of those books where the white dude author is so far up the asses of other white dudes that you have to wonder how he hasn't suffocated yet. However, this is also one of those books that, if you simply take out a few pages regarding queer bodies, eugenics, and racism, you're left with a humane portrait of the science of mutations as exist within Homo sapiens, from the mildness of red hair to the lethality of a mermaid tail. It's not the biggest surprise when the topic is a major intersection of science and marginalization, and I will say, I spent far more time rediscovering my life for the ingenuities and prat falls of biological processes than I did wincing at some of the more brutishly inane pronouncements. Still, being able to instantly tell a person's continental origin by their appearance? When's the last time you talked to a person of color who gets three to eight incorrect guesses about their ethnicity every couple of weeks and chooses to not say anything cause it's not worth the effort/stress/risk of violence? In any case, if you have a head for detailed explanations regarding microscopic levels of movement and mischance, the stomach for some of the more unlivable configurations of the human body, and the energy to maintain critical distance between you and the author's more insipid pronouncements, this is a treat. Just be sure to remember that, contrary to the book's sense of normality, we currently exist in the 21st century, not the 19th.

[Raquel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Muitíssimo interessante. Uma viagem incrível pela vida do embrião/feto. As escolhas genéticas que ocorrem, a maravilhosa inteligência da vida que começa, e o terror de quando a vida comete erros. Há erros ligeiros, há erros graves. Há erros que nos tornam um pouco mais altos que os nossos congéneres, há erros que podem ter consequências mais sérias. E a palavra erro não tem qualquer tipo de preconceito ou vontade de eugenia associado. É um erro no sentido mais puro, quando a máquina genética fica confusa, quando por carências alimentares ou outros factores, o ser que nasce é uma incógnita para os que nele não reconhecem a espécie humana. Este livro é incrível, sob todos os prismas. Não interessa só a biólogos, a principiantes da genética, aos curiosos acerca de gémeos siameses,etc., ou para simplesmente pereceber forma como a história olhou estes mutantes, interessa a qualquer um que um dia também esteve sob o jugo da "fábrica genética". Interessa ao Homem. Mil estrelas.

(Existe a tradução para português)

[Barbara · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you are interested in biology in general, and genetics in particular, this is a must read. The science is explained with just enough detail to make it accessable to the average reader with a modest scietific background.

The premis of the book is that we are all mutants, to one degree or another. The relatively small percentage of genetic mutations that cause catastrophic deformities are the focus of the early part of the book. At all times, the author treats those who have genetic mutations and deformity with respect, and there is no "sensationalism" that a book like this could have so easly degenerated into. Much of the material deals with the less obvious mutations that give the human race its great variety.

[Chip · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5. Extremely interesting look at mankind, what is "normal", and what is not. Chapters include: embryos, limbs, skeletons, growth, gender, skin and even aging (e,g,, mutations resulting in accelerated aging; query whether issues related to/resulting from aging are in fact the result of mutations not breed out of us by natural selection due to them, by definition, only becoming issues after people have typically already had children). Even the epilogue, focusing on "racial" variances and beauty, is fascinating. Won (justifiably) several awards.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. This was interesting but it felt like i was reading my textbook of developmental biology all over again

[Max · Rating 3 out of 5]

The subject of this book cannot help but be interesting, and it has enough real science to actually feel as though you're going in depth into the topic of genetic anomalies.

At a certain point, though, the voice slipped from that of a narrator leading the reader through interesting historical individuals and their accompanying genetics differences--such as conjoined twins and gigantism--into something more akin to a curious scientist dabbling in anthropology. By the end he's wondering whether, despite the obvious and acknowledged social and culture dangers of investigating the genetics of race, it would be worth satisfying our curiosity about it after all?

I found myself feeling vaguely uncomfortable at certain points; his complete bafflement at the fact that a male pseudohermaphrodite would be attracted to women despite being raised as a girl would have been charming were it not so ignorant as to basic understandings of sexual attraction. He talked about male pattern baldness and cures for it, but never talked about female hirsutism except to mention that men don't find it attractive. He discussed red hair in the context of how attractive redheaded women are. His discussion of the history of the clitorus took place entirely out of the actual social context of the medical establishment's history of suppression and denial of women's sexuality. I don't know if I was being overly sensitive or just dealing with yet another male author unaware of his sexist world view and lack of familiarity with modern ideas about sexuality and gender. 2003 was not that long ago.

Overall, an interesting and educational book, but I don't really like the author very much.

[Destiny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely loved this book. It was impressive, eye opening, had great perspective and clear writing. I really couldn't ask for more. This book inspired me to study developmental Biology.

[Hanna Rehnstrom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay, this ended up being a long review. Judging by the title I was afraid the contents were going to be wildly insensitive, and was glad to find that wasn’t the case. Throughout the book Leroi points out the absurdity in how humans throughout history have felt the need and right to categorize and label one another based on superficial appearance.

This book is filled with historical perspective that is interesting to read about. Especially the section about Mengele and the horrors his “test subjects” had to endure in Auschwitz, simply due genetic mutations that manifest themselves as something outwardly visible, as opposed to the plethora of (scientifically) equally interesting genetic mutations that affect the inside of the body - or in fact nothing at all.

However, I found the book to be somewhat monotonous. It often – not always, but often enough to get repetitive - follows a set pattern for each genetic variation:

1. Set the scene historically (repeatedly with a somewhat lengthy description of name-dropped white men going into “uncivilized territory” to find this “new human species” they think they’ve discovered and subsequently paying to purchase one of these individuals, often children, and take home to study in the safety and comfort of Europe)

2. Discuss the discrimination, superstition and exoticism people with this particular variation have had to endure

3. Further give historical perspective on several incorrect theories proposed as the cause

4. Finally reveal the biology behind the mutation, followed by philosophical musings (or ramblings), and onto the next one.

Which in itself is pretty interesting. But… being a one-book-at-a-time kind of gal, I recognize that this book may not have been for stretch reading, and would have been more excited to read about yet another mutation if I hadn’t just done so many, many times previously without catching a break with another book.

The author overall does an exceptional job of showing respect towards the individuals carrying genetic mutations. Only a few times I found myself bristling at – well, lack of social awareness and historical perspective, really. Which is quite impressive for a book so saturated with both.
I also found it slightly irritating that Leroi kept dropping words in other languages without translating, leaving whole sentences lost on me. The writing style was pretty pretentious at times. I don’t know, perhaps I’m just miffed that I don’t know any French.

[Ksenia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thoroughly enjoyable and educational read. The subject matter is handled with respect and due sensitivity; there's nothing gratuitously gawking about the work (though I wouldn't have minded more illustrations) The prose is at times too flowery for its own good which dilutes expected scientific clarity of the book.

The book is very well structured, making an inquiry into congenital disorders that manifest at different developmental stages, progressively. Each chapter handles a foray into superstitions of the past used to "explain" the condition, an inquiry into evolution of the medical understanding of each condition, culminating with the latest state of the art scientific explanation.

I definitely feel that I come away from this book much more informed about biological human condition and better understanding of the mechanisms that account not only for what is considered a disorder but also for individual variability within the "norm" (how come someone is taller than the other, how come some will have closer set eyes vs wider-set). The work really compliments and builds upon more narrow genetic material I have read before.

"We come from our childhood" so these topics are of very personal interest to me - having been taken to St. Petersburg's Kunstkamera at a tender age of 6 or 7, the collection of skeletons and embryos in jars rattled me deeply. Many such disorders look so horrifying that it's hard to refrain from mystical explanations (which book covers, too). So now, in my adulthood, I am working hard to understand the actual biological mechanisms behind the horrors in order to make them less horrific and less of "something so devastating can't be accidental". This book was crucial in undoing the harm.

[BookLab by Bjorn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spontaneous sex change and cyclops. Mermaid syndrome and conjoined twins. The tall and the very short. Albinism and rapid aging.
.
No stone is left unturned when Armand Marie Leroi’s takes us on a journey though the biology of the bizarre - and the beautiful!
—-
This book “..is not only about the human body as we might wish it to be, but as it is - replete with variety and error”.
——
📝 Mutation arise from errors made by the machinery that copies or repair DNA.
——
📝 “We are all mutants, but some of us are more mutant than others.”
——
📝 Clitoris = Penis
——
📝: ‘I do not want to be embarrassed by your black body at Daddy’s grave’ said her mother. Rita Hoefling was a white girl in the apartheid society of South Africa who suddenly turning black. At first she got subtle racist remarks and by the end of her transformation she was denied attending her own fathers funeral.. racism is dumb.
——
📝 In conjoined twins the skew toward femininity is overwhelming: about 77 percent are girls. No one know why this is.
——
📝 Boys who are castrated before puberty grow up to be unusually tall.
——
📝 “Women of all cultures seem to prefer men who are on average five centimeters (about two inches) taller than themselves.”
——
⚖️ VERDICT: The human body is amazing. This book feels like it celebration of the most haunting, weird and wonderful shapes the human body can take. It leaves me in awe.

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Life is beautiful, but the process of creating life involves variation and some of those variations have horrified and fascinated people through history. This book alternates historical with contemporary understanding of mutants, to powerful effect. A book purely of ancient misconceptions (heh) of science gets dull quickly. A book purely of how we understand biology to work also gets dull quickly. The author's explanation of historical understanding, and the elegant science writing makes this book much easier to read than it could have been.

The science writing makes its subject fascinating: the ballet dance of cells, the chemical flows of choreography, the cause-and-effect of markers, signals, and receptors. The historical accounts of scientific investigation into mutants from 1600s-modern times uncovers our mixed feelings towards mutants, the unpleasant treatment of people by scientists/anatomists, and the giant opaque fog of ignorance through which which we shine the weak lamp of science and claim understanding.

Some notes:

* Deformity taken as mark of divine displeasure

* "Des monstres" by Ambroise Pare in 1500s marks first earthly (non-supernatural) cause of deformity (pregnant woman looking at something ugly, theory of maternal impressions).

* teratology = science of monsters

* Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or enquiries into the very many received tenents and commonly presumed truths (1646) by Sir Thomas Browne, the mythbusters of his day: that the feathers of a dead kingfisher always indicate which way the wind is blowing, that the legs of badgers are shorter on one side than another, etc.

* William Harvey in 1642 was allowed to dissect deer the king had shot, so saw progress month by month of deer embryos. "I saw long since a foetus, the magnitude of a peascod cut out of the uterus of a doe, which was complete in all its members & I showed this pretty spectacle to our late King and Queen. It did swim, trim and perfect, in such a kind of white, most transparent and crystalline moysture (as if it had been treasured up in some most clear glassie receptacle) about the bignesse of a pigeon's egge, and was invested with its proper coat." Author of this book says: "The King apparently followed Harvey's investigations with great interest, and it is a poignant thought that when Charles I was executed, England lost a monarch with a taste for experimental embryology, a thing not likely to occur again soon."

* William Harvey's "De generatione animalium" (1651) cover showed Zeus holding egg, egg with slogan "Ex Ovo Omnia" (from the egg, all).

* "mutations alter the meaning of genes"

* "each new embryo has about a hundred new mutations that its parents did not have ... about four will alter the meaning of genes by changing amino acid sequence of proteins, three of which will be harmful"

* Ritta and Christina Parodi, conjoined twins. Parents prevented by Parisian authorities from exhibiting the girl(s), had to live in poverty, died at eight months. Body then heavily contested, eventually dissected in the big amphitheatre of Museum of Natural History. Made reputations.

* "Australian Aborigines inscribed a memorial to a dicephalus (two heads one body) conjoined twin on a rock that lies near what are now the outskirts of Sydney." (1300BC)

* "In a Kentish parish, loaves of bread in the shape of two women locked together side by side are distributed to the por every Easter Monday, a tradition, it is said, that dates from around the time of the Norman conquest and that commemorates a bequest made by a pair of conjoined twins who once lived there."

* la querelle des monstres -- the quarrel of the monsters -- was over explanations for deformations: was it God's beautiful mysterious work, or were they accidents? "If bodies were clocks, then there seemed to be a lot of clocks around that were hardly to the Clockmaker's credit". Preformationism (egg holds entire embryo writ small, containing its own eggs which contain ...) vs epigenesis (order emerges spontaneously after fertilisation).

* Sir Thomas Browne called the womb "the obscure world"

* conjoined twins feature inverted organs in the twin: heart on the right, etc. 1 in 8500 infants are born without a twin but with their organs inverted. Most famous was "an old soldier who died at Les Invalides in 1688. Obscure in life -- just one of the thousands who, at the command of Louis XIV, had marched across Flanders, besieged Valenciennes and crossed the Rhine to chasten German princelings -- he achieved fame in his death when surgeons opened his chest and found his heart on the right. In the 1600s Parisians wrote doggerel about him; in the 1700s he featured in the quarelle des monstres debate; in the 1800s he became an example of 'developmental arrest', the fashionable theory of the day. Were he to appear on an autopsy slab today, he would hardly be famous, but would simply be diagnosed as having a congenital disorder called 'Kartagener's syndrome'."

* Kartaganer's people are sterile and with poor sense of smell: cilia and sperm are driven by molecular motors that don't function because one of their proteins is encoded by a gene that is affected in Kartagener's.

I'm not up to page 60 and I'm abandoning this note taking. The book is fascinating, the writing is gently evocative, clear, and engaging.

[update on finishing]

The book is exquisitely crafted: evocative writing and elegant construction. By alternating between the outlandish history (where it's okay to marvel at freaks, as our predecessors did), and the contemporary science (so beautifully described as to make us marvel at the details of miracle of life without feeling, as with so many biological science fact books, that there's so many details and so few principles that it's all dispassionate stamp-collecting), Lerois has created that rare thing: science writing that is both good science and good writing.

[Mo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't really feel like a long review for this book so it will be a bit more key words than sentences.

Things I enjoyed:
- In general: so much information about how mutations or genetic differences can lead to devastating physical consequences
- Great that every chapter starts with regular development and then covers 'things that can go wrong' within that topic
- Many details about the research that was done to find out which genes are linked to which conditions, and the vast networks of genes and proteins responsible for our physique
- Nice interaction of history, anecdotes and biology.
- Pictures of the physical conditions were important and added clarity to the descriptions

Interesting topics mentioned:
- How embryonic order arises and develops
- Conditions such as: conjoined twins, polydactyly (multiple fingers), bone diseases, growth issues, sex reversals, male pattern balding, albinism, ageing, dementia, ALS
- If some of these mutations mentioned might be atavisms (meaning: maybe our ancestors carried it and mutations leads to reversal to this ancestral state)
- In general many trade-offs are mentioned, which is always a fascinating topic to me in Biology. For example, maybe if we live longer we have to deal with negative consequences to our physique or fertility or speed.

Things that were fascinating to me:
- The homology between female and male genitalia and how sex reversal can take place during development
- The topic of how and why we age, and the many different viewpoints on this
- Most of the variety visible in our DNA does not divide humanity along lines that correspond to races, so: 'is race even something that exists?' very interesting
- The interest of the writer into the function of physical beauty: maybe physical beauty is a lack of mutations?
- The amount of redundancy in proteins/genes of the human body
- The many 'unknowns': why are so many conjoined twins girls? How do conjoined twins arise? Why do most vertebrates never have more than five digits? Why are albinos so common? Why does baldness exist? Why is Alzheimer less common in black people?

Things I disliked:
- More schematic pictures of developmental processes to simplify the huge amount of text would have been nice
- In the last chapter the writer became a bit pretentious, especially in relation to other scientists it seemed like he found himself 'revolutionary' in his ways of thinking, which came off quite arrogant

Quotes
- “Our ostensible, often ostentatious, love of human diversity tends to run dry when diversity shades into deformity.”
- “We are all mutants. But some of us are more mutant than others.” (...) “Mutation is a game of chance, one we must all play, and at which we all lose. But some of us lovse more heavily than others.”
- “The boundary between the normal and the pathological is not only indistinct: it is mobile, ever shifting, ever driven by technology.”
"In the future, humans may well be able to engineer themselves, be it by better drugs or better genes, to live as long as they please, but the cost may be twenty-year-olds with all the vigour, appetities and charm of the middle aged.”
“If the route to cellular immortality is so easy, why have we not taken it? (...) immortality is a property of cancers.”

[Barry Welsh · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars. Fascinating

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was very interesting and thought-provoking and mostly avoids the worst excesses of popular science (though it indulges them somewhat). It sets out a fuzzy but definition of mutation and goes into a lot of detail about many topics related to the variation seen among humans - both one-off aberrations and some things that have become characteristic of lines of descent (ranging from small families to wide-spread characteristics).

This book has an interesting style in that it is jam-packed with the kind of literary, artistic and mythical allusions that you'd expect more from someone in the humanities than from someone in the sciences. I generally find that sort of thing irritating or pretentious - it's bad enough when a literature professor does it and it usually borders on insufferable from a scientist - but for whatever reason it didn't bother me in this book (though I'm not sure I'd want to listen to too many interviews with the author...)

Probably the greatest sin in this book is that, fairly early on, Leroi postulates something called the "calculator of fate" that makes decisions about how long bones or whatever should be and it was intensely annoying to me. The problem with this is that he is doing the annoying popular science thing of dumbing down a term (I don't even know what the scientific term for "calculator of fate" is - something I failed to learn because he has weirdly bowdlerized it in this way) but also he did so in a horribly pretentious way. From then on I was very prepared to hate this book, but it got a lot better after that, so we can chalk it up to a lapse in judgement.

One note of warning: this book will definitely make you want to go to the Hunterian Museum in London. Coincidentally, I finished reading this on a plane to London, so I was every excited to visit this museum only to find out that it is closed for four years for upgrades or repairs or something! So if you're reading this earlier than 2021, be prepared for disappointment (and maybe look into visiting the Mutter museum in Philadelphia instead).

4 of 5 stars

[Tairachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

[Book Review] Mutants: On the Forms, Varieties and Errors of the Human Body by Armand Marie Leroi
Where do I start. This is definitely one of the more fascinating and weird books I’ve ever read. If you enjoy reading about conjoined twins, hermaphrodite types, people with missing body parts (eg. cyclops, or too many parts eg. a three boobed woman), the Elephant Man, dwarfism, albinism, piebaldism, then this book is for you. The many illustrations throughout the book shed light on the variances of the human body.

Seeing the words ang mo and Singapore appear in the same sentence in this book did not fail to amuse. I also learned about myxedematous cretins; people with growth and developmental delay due to congenital hypothyroidism, resulting in them being in their 20s and still pretty much resembling toddlers.

I‘d borrowed this intriguing book from a friend back in secondary school and read it then, but only actually got my own copy late last year (it turned out to be autographed). Memorable parts of the book did jump out at me nonetheless.

Mutants was an intelligent, enjoyable and eye-opening read about genetic mutations, disorders, and the amazing varieties of human bodies and body parts. The book truly felt like a jurisprudence class, biology class, bioethics class, Latin class, French class, medicine class, sociology class, history class and geography class all rolled into one.

As the author muses, “Each new embryo has about a 100 mutations that its parents did not have. These new mutations are unique ... acquired while these cells were in the ... gonads and were not present when the embryo’s parents were themselves embryos. Of these 100 mutations, about 4 will alter the meaning of genes by changing the amino acid sequences of proteins. And of these 4 content-altering mutations, about 3 will be harmful. ... No one completely escapes this mutational storm ... Who, then, are mutants? There can be only one answer, and it is one that is consistent with our everyday experience of the normal and the pathological. We are all mutants. But some of us are more mutant than others.”

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every once in a while I come across a science book by accident that are absolutely incredible. This is one such book. I teach physiology and pathophysiology at a university in Utah, but I always am looking for good books on genetics. I liked the way the author approached this from a different and less straight-forward point. In using people with differences such as children with one eye that we call 'cyclops' and explaining how things go wrong in the genes, Leroi provides an excellent illustration of what needs to go right in the body in order to achieve an acceptable two eyes in the normal face. How it fails, brings on the cyclops condition.

I always mix history with my teaching about the body, because in neuroscience (my background) you learn the more ways you connect information to multiple parts of the brain through using stories, humor, etc the more likely the students are to remember what they are learning. That's what this book provides. Usually genetics can be a very long-winded and difficult thing to understand. But books like this makes much of this information available to everyone in a different format. I had to laugh with another reviewer who stated if her textbooks were like this she would actually read them. This is so true about textbooks, and I've been saying this for years. People who write textbooks, write them for their peers and not for the students!

[Anita Dalton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am decidedly a liberal arts kind of woman. I managed to cram enough science into my head to make it (barely) through college and then promptly forgot all of it. Much science seems like magic to me, a sentiment that makes me sound really dumb, but I’m okay with that (though I do need to mention that I understand how magnets work). So it was a little bit of a shock when I realized this was not a book about carny folk and old side-show acts that featured “freaks.” I was intimidated by the book and put off reading it.

When I finally picked this book up and gave it a try, it was a marvel at how accessible this book made biology and genetics to a non-science person like me. Moreover, it was an engrossing book, as well. Biology in the micro is a dramatic thing and as Leroi makes the science clear enough that even I can understand it, he shows the drama that takes place in our genetic code. I wish this book, clear and elegant, had been my college biology text. I sure would have enjoyed the class a lot more. Read my entire review here.

[Graychin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three and a half stars.

I read this while suffering through a bad case of poison oak, so I felt like a bit of a mutant myself.

More than just a trip to the freakshow, Mutants is a Baconian exploration of what biological error can teach us about biological success. The science in the book is delivered in brief chunks digestible without too much difficulty by a layperson (like me). The most fascinating subject matter comes in the second half of the book – especially in the chapters on growth, skin, old age, and death (which Leroi charmingly argues is the result of mutations that fall outside the purview of natural selection because they tend to occur after procreative age). The author’s cautious call for fresh scientific inquiry into the subject of race is fascinating. In the epilogue he dips a toe into aesthetics by imagining our ideals of physical beauty as the result of culturally selected mutations.

[Katia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fantastic book about the neverending variations in human genetics. Although the subject matter could have come across as prurient or voyeuristic in another author's hands, Leroi treats each case with dignity and class. The actual "mutants" are not the focus of this book - instead, it is an in-depth examination of the scientific basis of each mutation and the variability that makes us all human. Highly recommended for both scientists and laymen...best science book I've read since A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.

[Cj · Rating 1 out of 5]

This has to be one of the most boring books I've read in a long time.
I'm fascinated by mutations, evolution, DNA etc, and even spent last semester cutting and making recombinant DNA, but this book just bored me to tears.

For people just looking for a 'freakshow' or whatever, look elsewhere, this book is not full of pictures, and isn't geared towards that type of crowd anyways, it's geared towards people (like myself) who are fascinated with how DNA works, and how errors in DNA can happen through translation and transcoding.

This book is also full of very technical terms, that not everybody is going to understand, so if you haven't take some Biology courses, you're going to need to start googling some of the terms.

[Ricardo Moreno Mauro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Para todo aquel que le fascine la ciencia,,este va ser uno de sus libros favoritos. El Profesor Leroi, no lleva a entender a los mutantes, que en la historia de la medicina han sido de gran ayuda para entender a biología de los seres viso. La gracia es que combina de una manera magistral historias humanas con explicaciones científicas al más alto nivel. Personalmente soy científico y creo que su trabajo ha sido espectacular. Tiene una facilidad envidiable de comunicar hechos complejos de una manera simple y amena. Personalmente ya he usado algunos de sus ejemplos en clases y a los estudiantes les ha fascinado. Gracias Prof Leroi por darnos este espectacular libro.

[Courtney · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book for someone with a little bit of background in genetics, or possibly none at all. Leroi is fabulous at describing the biological processes that result in a variety of mutations. I took issue with the chapter on sex and gender, which treats those with mutations related to sex and gender as freaks to be pitied, while the rest of the book is much more respectful of genetic variation.

[J.F. Penn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating deep dive into the genetics and environmental impacts on the human body and mind. Definitely a little too technically scientific for a non biologist as myself and I did skip over some parts, but the mutations were so interesting, I persisted. Don't read if you're pregnant or wanting to be, I think this would give some people nightmares. It does me feel that life is a miracle though, when so much can go wrong in the creation of it.

[Sharon Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this book because of my interest in the old sideshow/freakshow culture and wanted to learn more about the how and why these things happen. I feel it promotes critical thinking, and now especially with wild propaganda photos running rampant on the internet and social media, and increases one's ability to distinguish between fact and undocumented, un-researched, "shocking" propaganda posts.