Politics and prose. We really enjoy hosting the author talks at this true leave wonderful venue be and the executive director and everybody else deserves lots of credit and recognition to turning this place and to such a vibrant center of cultural life. Lets give them a round of applause. We will hear about human dna in important element of community is a local independent bookstore many still exist the numbers have been growing thanks in large part to many people like you so when you feel the urge to buy a book, and shop local you can get the full experience by coming to politics and prose with Personalized Service as well as a sense of discovery or if you want to order online click on the book that you like. Now to human dna, Siddhartha Mukherjee awarded the nonfiction prize the emperor of formalities was an inquiry that had clinical and personal. He has done it again the tells the story of genetics with the social history of a personal narrative. He was so physically and mentally exhausted after emperor she did god expect to write another book but it was a natural paring with the prequel with that biological normalcy. And to ever wonder how much of our lives depend john dexter of parks down to expect a simple answer it is complicated. As far back that was a couple decades ago he kid distinguish and self then went to Harvard Medical School with a professor at columbia at university and to me n conversation this evening the editor and managing editor of the pbs news hour please join me to welcome Siddhartha Mukherjee and judy. [applause] thanks for that creches introduction gracious introduction. If you read a the emperor of all morality issue will be more than fascinated by the gene. I feel like my microphone is a little bit louder. There are so many ways with like to begin but the years that you worked on the book you said you were exhausted but then Something Else was going on in your mind and you write about that in a way that will pull every right to end the beginning of the book. What was going on in your life and to even think about writing this . I did not think of it as the name of the book but as i was growing up by had a history of Mental Illness and my family i had to uncles with bipolar having lived with that for many years one of them lived with my family what was growing up. Then some time in my childhood was also diagnosed and institutionalized. And that elephant in the room would not go away. Most families said that they could not deny that any more like my father could not that that was a part of his life with that heredity component. That is when we began to talk about it. So constantly in the back so who else send what does it look like . Some of this story was my story long before it came my story and when i finished riding the emperor of all maladies in i thought i would be done but then i kept coming back to this idea it was Like Star Wars the prequel to the sequel laugh laugh. Rededicate the book to to people none of them was your own grandmother so there is the powerful story there but to read from the start of the book you were with your father and went to visit your cousin . This is where the story begins. This is the prologue of the of book the blood of your parents. In the winter of 2012 my father accompanied me lost in the private anguish. The hearing testified and he was the firstborn. Since 2004 when he was 40 he was confined for a the mentally ill. End before out and would treat him throughout the day. The lonely Counter Campaign with that diagnosis that magically easy demands and self. And once without warning to leave it to live a secretly normal life. But my father knew and i knew there was more than these visits. The only member of Mental Illness of the Four Brothers to suffered of the unraveling of the mind. And les part of the byelections lies in the gramm recognition that he pay be buried. Then this the first paragraph of the book. So in your family you heard stories about it you said your grandmother was influential fan to how she was toward your uncle. He came to live with us because he could no longer take care of himself. So in this Nuclear Family growing up with aspirations in new delhi was saved remnant and he moved in with us by then. Years later, and the idea that in your family were constantly thinking about this one generation to the next but it wasnt everybody in the family or every cousin and certainly not you. But, that was the impetus that brought you to think, that he wanted to spend more time looking at the genetic mystery. There is a connection to cancer in the first book you were embarking on a completely different and ambitious story. I published a small excerpt with that picture of me and my father for a price set on a for many years i didnt do anything with it but the first thing that i wrote and didnt give it out to the left anyone as part of my writing process but i went back to wit to it and the genetics is about family, it is this a reminder we think of the word genius has infused our culture as the abstract concept that people talk about in a laboratory. But it is family. It has to do with family and how you and i are made. Who doesnt have a of relative that is affected . You could put that with an interaction with the jeans now when i look back, this is really about family and living organisms that emanate of the things that are called genes. You wrote this and before i ask you about the history history, you write this with the sense of real urgency that you felt was important to get this down now because theres a lot going on in science. We talked about this earlier , you had a sense it is important for people to understand dont just leave that up to the experts. I will give u. S. Sense of what is going on moving forward. We are learning to read and write the as human genome. I mean as you know, 2002 we obtained the sequence. That is what it is the entire repository of Genetic Information of the human embryo and it is written in code one. I have not memorized it. [laughter] but here is what is interesting, if you imagines the encyclopedia, it is 66 false sense of the Encyclopedia Britannica lining up all the edges if you would pick them upper pick them up, yet out of that there is the fourletter code that builds you and me. With small variations and that is the difference between you and me. So to understand those technologies number one to read that code very clearly beginning to predict what might have been in your future of the genome for one example if you have the one gene mutation for Breast Cancer but it could be 10 times higher than those who dont. If you have Cystic Fibrosis gene mutation if both parents the chance is nearly 100 percent the diseases in your future. I can tell you from your embryonic cell that you will have that disease 100 percent that is reading the genome and now is more complicated about illness. And complicated things about potential identity. That is hell we enter the territory to have some moral concerns. Not only do i do that reading but to make intentional directional changes those astonishing technologies that they learn to use says humans and then pick out one volume erased one word playback in to playback believes the rest of untouched. Seems once they acquire the technology we need to talk about them. Last week there was a closeddoor meeting and that entire human genome one but in other words, they you could take that entire human genome. It is not Science Fiction fantasy but all the technologies that allow us to get there and to think about Mental Illness that you may be interested in and if you dont you have an unbelievably important piece send our future. I was thinking about this and that the information kind of sat there and it was another couple of thousand years, or almost a thousand before Charles Darwin started doing his work and then some other interesting characters and their almost these signposts along the way people who have worked on genetics and it all came together later to be critical. Talk about that early work that was done. Whats interested in about it is that of course this is a perennial question. Since the dawn of human history, you can imagine one of the first question we asked ourselves is why do we look like our parents were why do we not look like our parents. These two simultaneous contradictions, the ying and yang of of these two questions have been part of our dna forever. Who hasnt asked that question. When an illness strikes. When two identical twins are born we say why do they look like the same and so forth. Its an astonishing fact and he was in astonishing biologist. Which most people dont realize. Yes. He was trying to divide the world up into different organic forms of. Aristotle realized, or he made the argument that what was really moving was message, some kind of message. Its a little bit ke a carpenter shaping a piece of wood. The carpenter, when the carpenter shapes it, how human beings are formed, when a carpenter shapes shapes a piece of wood, he doesnt shape it in a material way ,comma what he does is he transmits information as it were his handiwork or her handiwork into that piece avoid. That is what happens. He is transmitting information, message into that piece of wood and thats what make that would acquire whatever form. This was back in, i dont remember exactly when that point the time was, but this was back in the day when people were debating about how god gave us forms. Theres a long silence after that. For a while people thought that in fact this was so complicated, how on earth could a fully formed embryo develop when a woman conceives, how can that possibly happen. They made the argument, it was an argument made in the 1600s that hundreds that in fact a tiny miniature human being was sitting inside sperm, wrapped up like this and major pictures of it too. If you thought about it carefully and i had to be the case that since that animal would also generate its own children, many had to be sitting inside. And so forth and so on infinitely. Its a little crazy if you think about it. This was one of the most popular ideas about how we transmitted likeness which was of course the gene. But the information ,comma what he figured out and shared really sat there, along comes Charles Darwin who did some important work in all of this, but there are some others who came along that were not appreciated. You spend some interesting pages on the monk. Yes, its a fascinating story he realizes, its very interesting that both darwin and him are monks. Its instructive about our times and people found no contradiction contradiction about exploring our universe, someone should read the capacity and compassion they brought to their scientific explorations was incredible. So he was a monk and he began to do extremely simplified experiment. That was his trick. His main insight was to simplify this idea around genetics. He said i want to forget all about that and all im going to do is study with almost monastic concentration, i will study what happens with one or 27 individual features across multiple generations of peace. Here were people talking about hugely complex experience about human embryos and how we were born and there was him sitting in a small monastery at the edge of the city where he sat all i want to do is study seven tests and map them, he didnt coin the word gene, he had no idea what these were and at the end of it, just by mathematical reasoning, he realized realized that has got to be something, the unit of information must be passing between the parent and the offspring. He wanted to work with mice, but in fact his superiors would let him. Thats right because mice was a little too risque. So i spent some time in the monastery. Its a beautiful place. You can get to it easily from vienna but its a little bit of a schlep. I traveled over to the monastery and i arrived there and there was a woman at the front desk and i said ive come all this way, i want to see the birthplace of biology. Was like a pilgrimage for me. He said im sorry, the monastery is closed so this is the Czech Republic and i said i pleaded, i bagged a knife that ive come to all this way and i just just want to be inside and see the library and she said no and i said who do i apply to and completely without any irony she said to me. So im from india and i said to complete this game and i said i hereby apply to you and so she was defeated and she let me in so i spent four or five days going back and forth, being in the library and looking up that garden where he planted those peas that generated this thing which is now taken over the world. And with the work that he did, it wasnt appreciated for a long time and he was gone and at some point, there are a number of other important figures. Remind us, who who came up with the term genetics . Psalmody gets credit for that. Remember he doesnt even have that word in his vocabulary but he knows he stumbled on something. He sent copies of his report, he condensed it to 40 some pages and sent it to the scholarly centers but it was dismissed. Everyone said what is he writing about and why should i be reading this and he went on describing and then in the 1900s he gets rediscovered and soon after in 1909 we find the word gene because botanists and biologists begin to say to himself we have to have a word for this. Its abstract, we dont know what it is, is a molecule or a structure, but something carries this information. We know its important and so weve got to have a word for it. William, one of his great defenders, i talk about him and theres a great picture of him in the book and points to the word genetics from genius, generation, all of these words coming together and he coins the word gene for genetic and then his colleague says we have to name that thing and they name it the gene. So its fits and starts. This progress and set back and more progress and you do an amazing wonderful job of bringing to light these people who really probably led on extraordinary lives and then you fastforward, but before you get to that point things really go badly. Why did that happen . Its important to remember that offtrack. The desired you manipulate heredity, you can do powerful studies. He invented the term eugenics. He didnt know very much about genetics and he made a huge mistake. He was a great mathematician and statistician, but he also lived in darwin shadow all his life. Can you imagine these two giants , he had many important contributions to statistics and he thinks that regardless of what the gene is, whether its a gene or no gene, we can use human heredity by manipulating heredity and make better human beings. He supposedly coined the word eugenics, good genes, in order to make better human beings. If you selectively breed the best we can superiorly emancipate ourselves and heres whats astonishing, this was considered a progressive idea like taking evening walks or getting a very healthy idea for humankind and many progressives, some exceptions and notable exceptions that this this is a great idea, we should do more of this. It took off in england and stayed in england, and that idea metastasizes and reaches the shores of this country where it mingles with the yankee practicality and becomes, it morphs into not just lets breed the best, lets sterilize those who carry bad genes. That escalates slowly and leads to a case that many people know, the carry box case. Carrie carrie buck was a woman who was accused of having to be sterilized and the great judicial moderate, the case climbed to his court and it said three generations of imbeciles is enough and carrie buck was moved to a state colony and she was forcibly taken to an operating theater and sterilize sterilized on that pretext. There was no proof that she had anything. There was no evidence. If anything she was, she was a bit of a rebel. That was the worst of her sentence. You are saying to me early today that you felt it was so important and shes one of two people you dedicate the book too this happen. Its not just nazi germany. Right and to finish up the story, it metastasizes again and moves from selective reading to selective sterilization to selective extermination and that is the final incarnation and we now remember it by that. Beginning with people who had Mental Illness, moving on to things like depression and moving on to the racial and athletic and human cleansing, and i put that right in the middle of the book. In fact i wanted to start the book with that idea, but then i realized to start the book with the german episode, i realized it was much much more chilling to watch what happens in front of your own eyes. That the road to that menace, the road to that ghastly nest was paved by a desire to emancipate the desire for perfectibility and to make ourselves better and less than 30 years, the extermination of someone who has a mild form of Mental Illness. I think we all want to believe that could never happen again, but as you set a a moment ago, because of the incredible advances that have been made in such a short time that people really dont understand ,comma what do you think the possibility is that decisions could get made now or in the near future that not a repetition of some of the worst of what you described, but we could head off in a direction that could be hard to turn around. The one example in the United States and one example internationally, i personally think having read the story, i think its very likely that we will have a statemandated form of eugenics. I think whats much more difficult to contend with is that we are entering an era of personalized eugenics. This technology is available today. Very soon you should be able to sequence every single gene of your unborn child. The question you need to ask yourself is what to do with this information. You wont know what to do with the information unless you know what genes are and how they interact. That is one arena thats important, but men men meanwhile lets not forget that numerically the largest project is already going on in india and china. In some parts of india there are 700 women compared to 1000 men. There has never been this large of a skew that is a project fostered by science, beginning with ultrasound diagnosis and ending up with amniocentesis and gender diagnosis through chromosomal analysis, etc et cetera. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a time where were already part of it. It has destabilized the way we think about it. Its not someone elses am i its not some other worlds problem. This is our worlds pro