{"cache":{"posts_f30bc_584a5":{"__typename":"RootQueryToPostConnection","nodes":[{"__typename":"Post","id":"cG9zdDoyMjEyNQ==","databaseId":22125,"featuredImage":null,"author":null,"date":"2015-01-20T11:00:23","uri":"/articles/lets-talk","title_b28e9_bf21a":"Let’s Talk","slug":"lets-talk","categories_3cd3e_bf21a":{"__typename":"PostToCategoryConnection","edges":[{"__typename":"PostToCategoryConnectionEdge","node":{"__typename":"Category","id":"dGVybToxNTQx","slug":"health-traits","name":"Health + Traits","uri":"/category/health-traits","seo":{"__typename":"TaxonomySEO","title":"Health + Traits Archives - 23andMe Blog","opengraphTitle":"Health + Traits Archives","metaDesc":"23andMe's Health + Ancestry Service gives you personalized genetic insights and tools that can help make it easier for you to take action on your health.","opengraphDescription":"23andMe's Health + Ancestry Service gives you personalized genetic insights and tools that can help make it easier for you to take action on your health.","fullHead":"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n"}}}]},"imageOptions":{"__typename":"Post_Imageoptions","featuredImageSquare":{"__typename":"MediaItem","id":"cG9zdDoyMjEyNw==","mediaDetails":{"__typename":"MediaDetails","sizes_cad4b_bf21a":null,"height":144,"width":150},"mediaItemUrl":"https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/christine-Kenneally.jpg","sourceUrl_772ce_bf21a":"https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/christine-Kenneally.jpg"},"singleTemplateFeaturedImage":null},"content_b28e9_bf21a":"

The author Christine Kenneally – who wrote the wonderful book The $\"Invisible$ Invisible History of the Human Race – graciously agreed to participate in a Twitter chat we are hosting on January 21st at 4pm EST.

Her book had some delightful insights into how our DNA, our personal history and our environment shape us. Using personal stories, including her own, she conveys the complicated history of genetic science.

A former academic Christine, who has written for the New Yorker and is a contributing editor at Buzzfeed, said she became a journalist, in part, because it allowed her to expand the kind of questions she was exploring as a scientist.

“I became increasingly frustrated by the narrowing of interests that my academic career seemed to require,” she said. “Journalism allowed me to keep asking the questions that interested me, all the big and the little ones.”
\n

The beauty of her book is that Christine uses personal stories including her own family’s story to explain some of the issue around genetic testing.

“I knew that I cared deeply about some topics that many other people found pretty dry, and I wanted to understand why they mattered to me,” she said. “Asking that question led me into the past and back to my family. I also wanted to find a way to connect with readers who wouldn’t normally be interested in science. Working out why I cared helped me think about the ways that they might.”

But her book also looks at how the advances in genetics broadens our understanding of biology, evolution and medicine.

“DNA won’t change everything about medicine, but I do think it is going to have a huge impact on much of it,” Christine said. “I feel deeply excited that my children are going to be able to access medical information that may help them make choices about their (health). I hope I live long enough to see what happens. It’s so fascinating.”

Join what promises to be a stimulating and interesting conversation with Christine. We want to hear from you. So ask Christine a few questions or simply track our chat on Twitter with the hashtag #23BookClub. You can enter for a chance to win a copy of the book.

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In her wonderful book, “The Invisible History of the Human Race,” writer and $\"Invisible$ journalist Christine Kenneally conveys how your life is part of a thread of life that extends both backward and forward in time.

“We live in a temporal envelope,” Kenneally writes. “For most of us the horizon extends forward maybe two generations and back just two or three… It isn’t until you populate the family tree that it becomes clear how brief a human life is, how soon it is over, and how you only play a bit part in a story line that expands out and contracts back and goes off in directions that no one can predict or control.”\n

\nAnd it’s DNA – which is both the recipe for life and a record of it – that offers the thread linking the past, present and future.

It’s a beautiful idea and one that might change some people’s perspective about the importance of knowing a bit about where you come from.

This is just one of many delightful insights in her book that looks at how DNA, history and environment shape us. Using some of her own personal history, as well as fascinating stories from others, Kenneally conveys how the complicated interplay of biology, the past and the present makes us who we are. We are not fated by our biology, yet we are not free from it either. Understanding it can help us understand much about ourselves and where we’re going.

A few reviews – in the New York Times, and Salon – have already noted that her book marks a nice counterpoint to Nicholas Wade’s “A Troublesome Inheritance.”

Kenneally didn’t write her book to be played off Wade’s, but her story illustrates that human behavior and culture isn’t just about biology. It’s all much more complicated than that. But your DNA gives you insight that you wouldn’t be able to know otherwise. Indeed for many, using genetics is the only way to dig into a past that was erased by the Holocaust or slavery or simply not knowing ones parents.

The book isn’t just about looking back and self-exploration, Kenneally also tackles the science and gives us a quick tour of the uncomfortable history of eugenics, both in the United States and in Nazi, Germany. But she also quotes from Wendy Roth, a professor at the University of British Columbia, who notes that DNA testing might do more toward bringing people together by showing us how much we have in common.\n

\n“This kind of testing seems to make people more aware of how much racial mixing has gone on historically,” Roth said.

Kenneally is at her most interesting when she explores the stories revealed by delving into our DNA. She marvels at how genetics can confirm or alter what we know about our identity and ourselves. It’s also can reveal more about the human story.\n

\n“If everyone had his DNA analyzed, and that information were linked to everyone’s historical information, it would be the nearest thing to the book of humanity,” Kenneally writes.

Give it a read.

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Christine Kenneally

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Invisible History

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