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

Leroi, Armand Marie

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0002571137 ISBN 13 : 9780002571135

Editeur : HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, 2004

Synopsis

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.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Armand Leroi was born in 1964 in New Zealand, and has lived all over the world;. He has published widely in technical journals on evolutionary and developmental genetics, and is currently Reader in Evolutionary Developmental Biology at Imperial College London.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
• Date d'édition: 2004
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0002571137
• ISBN 13: 9780002571135
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 320
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Silvia Ruiz Crespo; silviaruizcrespo3@icloud.com; a11.cyberbull@gmail.com; ; Calle otamendi; Madrid; Madrid; 28039; Espagne