Reviews of my new book GMO Sapiens on #CRISPR & human modification

cover GMO SapiensIt’s exciting that the reviews are starting to come in on my new book, GMO Sapiens, on human genetic modification including CRISPR.

Here is one from The Scientist and the book was recommended by Scientific American.

Reviews from individual authors and scientists are below.

“GMO Sapiens could not be more timely. New technologies like CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing have great clinical potential, but they also bring us closer to a world in which future children can be pre-conceptively manipulated and customized to possess certain traits. A stem cell biologist, Knoepfler explains cutting-edge developments in human genetics in accessible prose. More importantly, he clearly presents the ethical complexities around designer babies and the pursuit of genetic perfection at a moment when the Brave New World envisioned decades ago by Aldous Huxley mimics reality more than science fiction.”

     -Alexandra Minna Stern, author of Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America, 2d ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). 

 

“The book takes us on an engaging roller-coaster ride through the new genetics, which could greatly impact many economic, policy and personal decisions in the next few years.  It works hard (and succeeds) at fairly presenting pros and cons, as well as capturing as durable a glimpse of the future as possible in this, the most rapidly changing technology ever. Many readers will be shocked at how close we are already.”

-George Church, CRISPR pioneer and author of Regenesis

 

“Paul Knoepfler manages to convey the excitement and potential of genetic engineering without sounding like Pollyanna, and compassionate concern over its misuse without sounding like Chicken Little—a highwire act that is all the more virtuosic for its seeming effortlessness. GMO Sapiens is informative, thoughtful, entertaining, and deeply humane.” —Nathaniel Comfort, Baruch Blumberg Chair of Astrobiology at the Library of Congress/NASA and Professor, Department of the History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University