Reviews for Healthy Children 2000

The average rating for Healthy Children 2000 based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-06-25 00:00:00 Javier Franco (forthcoming review in the World Medical and Health Policy) Dr. Francis Collins is one of the most distinguished scientists of his generation, not just in America but around the world. His work in genetics stands at the pinnacle of medical science, and his role in the Human Genome Project as administrator and researcher will be long remembered. One anticipates with great interest reading his thoughts on how DNA will revolutionize medicine. One would be largely disappointed. The Language of Life, Collins' attempt to provide a guide to this revolution for the layman, isn't a bad book. It's just not a very exciting or interesting or well-organized one. Worse, it shows the impact of editing for mass marketing in two lamentable respects. First, and most importantly, the book has been "Oprahfied." It's almost painful to read as the distinguished director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) ends each chapter with commonplace advice on exercising more, how to learn more about genetic racial identity on the web, and how to stop smoking. "(q)uitting is hard. But help is available!" gushes Collins. While almost all of Collins' advice is correct and would improve our health, much of it is only tangentially related to the deeper questions of genetic medicine. Second, Collins puts much of the basic science about genetics in a short appendix, as if his readers would not be able to handle it in the text itself. The largest problem, though, is that Collins is not a particularly gifted writer. In his hands, the complex remains quite complex, and lacks poetry or beauty. In the hands of a great science writer, like James Gleick, impossibly dense topics like quantum physics come alive. Here, even potentially moving stories about individuals wrestling with genetic diseases often fall flat. The writing is sometimes clunky, and never inspired. "Debates…rage" on page 86, and also on page 87. The book moves from topic to topic without much connection or narrative. It also shows sign of hasty construction, as on page 85, when the exact procedures used by the major direct-to-consumer DNA analysis companies are outlined for a second time. With all these defects, it should be noted that the book rewards the persistent reader with a multitude of insights. The majesty and power of DNA in shaping our medical destinies is conveyed, and readers will be struck again and again that one or two changes among 3 billion base pairs of DNA in our genome can result in stunning alterations to our lives. For medical professionals around the world, this book serves as a useful compendium of the state of genetic medicine, 2010. It covers topics such as pharmacogenomics (the study of how our specific genetic variations make any given medicine more or less effective, or even toxic), genetic therapy, ethical dilemmas in genetics, and genetic testing, and covers them well. Collins is deeply ambivalent, to say the least, about the intersection of corporate power and genetic research. We see it manifest itself most personally in near total avoidance of Craig Venter, except to describe him in the appendix as a "maverick." Given that these two men shared the cover of Time Magazine for heading the two projects that successfully mapped the human genome for the first time, this may seem odd, unless one knows of the years of tension between the governmental researcher Collins and the privately funded Venter. In Venter's book about the race to unlock the genome, Collins was frequently, and perhaps unfairly, depicted as an adversary. Collins may have sought to seem more mature by not using his own book to attack back, but leaving Venter out of the story almost entirely seems petty as well. And while readers may end up sympathizing with Collins on the merits, or at least share his fears about the commercialization of genetics, they may regret that his side of the argument isn't presented with more passion, skill, and panache.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-09-28 00:00:00 James Millican This isn't a book I'd usually pick up. Written by the director of the Human Genome Project, it's all about genetics and how recent revolutions in that field will affect the future of personalized medicine. That said, it's very well-written. Dr. Collins writes for a lay audience, presenting enough basic genetics for the reader to understand his points (sometimes accompanied by helpful illustrations) but yet not enough to make the content overwhelming. Each section touches on some aspect of genetics, highlighted by case studies. Discussions start with conditions where a single "misspelled" letter in the genome causes disease (like cystic fibrosis) or much higher susceptibility to disease (like the BRCA1/2 variant yielding much higher risk for breast and ovarian cancer). But they broaden out to conditions where multiple genes are at work (to greater or lesser extent), how genes might interact with environmental conditions, what role your genes might have in personality traits or aging, and a number of other highly interesting topics. Collins mentions that some companies are already offering to sequence your entire genome for you and analyze the findings, and then discusses whether people would actually want to know their own risk factors. (The answer, like so many things, is: "It depends.") At the end of each chapter is a short list of practical action steps you can take now, with the resources currently available. Collins ends with a section on the potential future of genetics and personalized medicine. I expect that just about everything he talks about beyond the next 5-10 years is going to prove to be wrong, just because the field is moving so fast. Collins himself admits that advances in the last 2-3 years would have seemed far-fetched as little as seven or eight years ago. I don't expect that pace to slow down any time soon. And I look forward to seeing some of that progress actually trickle down to the level of individualized care for the average person.