So what about the enormous majority of the genome with no known function? It turns out that much of those vast, mysterious tracts that used to be called “junk DNA” have been faithfully preserved over eons and seem to have gene-regulatory functions. I’m guessing that if those stretches are junk, they’re the kind of junk that will come down out of the attic to fetch big prices on Antiques Roadshow. The idea of contributing to a vast, wiki-like public library of genetic research greatly appealed to me. But I couldn’t quite imagine putting my comprehensive genetic data—data that also belonged to my whole family—online. I could see how ordinary all this will one day become, how declaring whether you had the version of the APOE gene that correlates with late-onset Alzheimer’s might one day become as normal as slapping a pub shot up on your blog or discussing your Zoloft dosage at a dinner party. I just couldn’t bring myself to become one of the first dozen people to inhabit the place. But here's the thing about being alone: you begin to learn what you are made of. You discover there's a rhythm to your breathing, strength in your bones. That year, I found in myself a current running deep—like a secret underground river—silent and steady and strong. It's mysterious, this dark river, but it's constant and true, as sure as the breath I take in. I like to think it's the real me—the secret me. In early May, Jorge Conde calls. My sequencing plan is changing. Things are happening even faster than predicted. I’ve become a new experiment at the Beijing Genomics Institute, one that is proving the viability of a new technique called paired-end protocol sequencing. Genes can have many different viable variants, each one called an allele. When DNA replicates, small errors during copying can garble the bases in the sequence. For instance, a stretch of the myoglobin gene might be erroneously copied from

The Book of Me: A Children’s Journal of Self-Knowledge: a

I read the ood of media accounts, speculating about what will happen to our identities when the dust settles and we’re left with massive amounts of information gradually turning into actionable knowledge. On some days, in Illinois, waiting for my results, I imagine that my future doctor visits will feel more or less unchanged: _Am I dying? _Yes, but not yet. What should I do? Whatever you can. How long do I have? Not long. What happens next? Read it and weep.The RRP is the suggested or Recommended Retail Price of a product, set by the publisher or manufacturer. You have three variants associated with aspects of intelligence,” he continues. Reassuring. “Also, you may not get very good results from the anticoagulant warfarin.” That could be very handy to know, from here on out. Why, you may wonder, do I want to learn more about myself? Let me share a story about my own secret self... Combining psychology, philosophy and sheer fun, The Book of Me is an introduction to the vital art of self-knowledge, showing how it can help us grow into calmer, wiser and more rounded human beings. Children love to explore, born with a boundless desire to understand the world around them. While most of the outside world has already been mapped, there’s a whole other world that has yet to be discovered, one that’s accessible only to them: their own minds.

The Book of Me | GQ The Book of Me | GQ

old cat Baxter put to sleep. There were times I felt so completely gut-sad that all I could manage to focus on was the rise and fall of my ribs as the breath came in and out.Only three human beings—James Watson, J. Craig Venter, and an anonymous Chinese scientist—had had their essentially complete diploid genomes sequenced. A few more were in the works. Already the race was under way to make the process ordinary. Here was my real story: the infancy of direct-to-consumer complete genetic blueprints. Medically, all that my 6 billion data points will tell me are probabilities, most of them not actionable, but probabilities that are gradually becoming something firmer. Maybe chief among the other things my genome might tell me (if only briey) is what it felt like, for a while, not to know. What the sequence certainly will not tell me is anything about who I am, where I’m going, or how I got from childhood—let alone my young adulthood in the Boston Fens, head filled with the wildest of fictional books—to a man of 50 in a cab on Boylston Street, about to be told the sum total of the code that I was born with and that will take me on into the grave. Denouement AFTER 2,000 MAN-HOURS and 9,000 supercomputer CPU hours, my genome is ready. I return to Boston in mid-August, this time staying at the old nineteenth-century Charles Street Jail, recently turned into a twenty-first-century luxury hotel: old inheritances transformed into new variations. When I eat with Conde and Kiirikki again, it’s in a new restaurant. It has to be: I have the novelty gene. They’re bursting with excitement, trying not to give away tomorrow’s show. With hundreds of guided questions organized into sections about your past, present, and future, family history, and inner self, The Book of ME offers an excellent means to preserve memories and discover hidden aspects of yourself. Both a goal-setting and motivation journal, The Book of Me allows teens to navigate their own self-discovery and help them become their best selves!