Blood Matters

by Gessen, Masha

• ISBN13: 9780156033312
• ISBN10: 0156033313
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-11-11
• Publisher: Mariner Books

Summary

In 2004 genetic testing revealed that Masha Gessen had a mutation that predisposed her to ovarian and breast cancer. The discovery initiated Gessen into a club of sorts: the small (but exponentially expanding) group of people in possession of a new and different way of knowing themselves through what is inscribed in the strands of their DNA. As she wrestled with a wrenching personal decision'”what to do with such knowledge'”Gessen explored the landscape of this brave new world, speaking with others like her and with experts including medical researchers, historians, and religious thinkers. Blood Matters is a much-needed field guide to this unfamiliar and unsettling territory. It explores the way genetic information is shaping the decisions we make, not only about our physical and emotional health but about whom we marry, the children we bear, even the personality traits we long to have. And it helps us come to terms with the radical transformation that genetic information is engineering in our most basic sense of who we are and what we might become.

Author Biography

MASHA GESSEN is a journalist who has written for Slate, Seed, the New Republic, the New York Times, and other publications, and is the author of two previous books. She lives in Moscow.

Table of Contents

The Past
My Mother's Fatal Flaw	p. 3
The Four Mothers of Jewsp15
The Post-Nazi Era	p. 57
The Present
Indecision	p. 71
A Decision at Any Cost	p. 78
The Father of Hereditary Cancers	p. 117
The Cruelest Disease	p. 139
The Science of Matchmaking	p. 166
The Operation	p. 191
The Future
The Future the Old-Fashioned Way	p. 199
Biobabble	p. 238
What We Fear Most	p. 264
Acknowledgments	p. 283
Glossary of Key Terms	p. 285
Notes on Sources	p. 289
Index	p. 309
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Excerpt. © All rights reserved.Chapter 1 My Mother's Fatal FlawI spent the day of August 21, 1992, driving to a mountainous desert town whose name, in the scorching heat and fine dust, was a seductive mockery: Palm Springs, California. I had embarked upon the most Californian of endeavors, an editorial retreat for the Los Angeles-based magazine where I worked. I ate dinner with my colleagues at a bland Mexican restaurant. I had two margaritas, talked more than I usually did, and told a story that left me vaguely uneasy, as I always feel when I talk about my mother: I cannot talk about her without telling lies. I do not remember what I said, but it was something complimentary, even prideful, I think, and though I loved my mother and was proud of her, talking of her in that way, with all that had gone wrong between us, was most certainly a lie.I woke up at four that morning, in the bedroom of a rental bungalow, with a wave of nausea pushing its way up to my burning throat. I stumbled to the bathroom, drank from the tap and threw cold water on myself, washing my face and head clumsily, then looked at my bloated face in the mirror and wondered how two margaritas could have done this to me. I went back to bed and next opened my eyes at a few minutes before seven, without a trace of a hangover but with a sudden wakefulness I could not fight. With hours to kill before the meetings began, I tried going out for a walk in the desolation of Palm Springs, considered a swim in the kidney-shaped pool, and finally went back inside the bungalow intending to read some magazine submissions. I spread them out on the coffee table and, before starting, picked up the phone and dialed my parents in Boston. I was checking in at least daily back then and knew they would be awake-they were three hours ahead. These considerations were background noise; I had picked up the phone without pausing to think, just getting one of my daily chores out of the way while I had time to kill.A strange male voice answered the phone."Papa?" I asked, knowing that it was not."Hold a minute," the man said nervously, and a moment later my father came on the line.My mother was dead. The man answering the phone was a policeman who had come to fill out a report, which, as it turned out, was a necessary part of letting someone die at home.My mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer two years earlier. By the following summer, it had already spread to her bones, and then it got to her liver and killed her.My mother had last woken up at seven that morning-four o'clock in California, when I had first awakened-and asked for ice cream. Her liver was failing. Her throat must have been burning up. She died a few minutes before ten. That was the moment I had bolted awake for the second time, the bizarre toxic symptoms of three hours earlier mysteriously gone, and my inextricable physical relationship to my mother proven to me for the first time in my conscious life-at the moment hers ended.The second time the physical relationship proved itself was on January 28, 2004, at a coffee bar in Cambridge, Massachusetts-an accidental location I shall avoid in the future, much as I have avoided revisiting Palm Springs. I was sitting at a small square table, trying to fix my ailing laptop, when my cell phone rang and a professionally sensitive woman's voice said, "I am returning your call. The results of your tests have arrived. And there is a change." She paused. "In the BRCA1 gene, there is deleterious mutation." She paused. "I'm sorry."BRCA stands for "breast cancer." BRCA1 and BRCA2 are two genes known to play a role in the development of breast and ovarian cancer. The caller was a genetic counselor informing me that my mother had passed on to me a mutant gene. I was surprised. I was shocked. I should not have been. I had gone to get tested, I had known enou