Superb plain English account

Highly recommend as an introduction to everything you need to know about genetic engineering, from the technical / scientific background and facts to the philosophical and ethical questions surrounding its history and current and future application.

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only so far in but,

only so far in but ... this is a great, mind changing, and energy enthusing listen so far.

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Accessible, broad-spectrummed and fascinating

Metzl takes what is an incredibly complex topic and chops it into digestible, understandable chunks. What is genetic engineering? Where are we with the technology? What's possible? Who are the big players? What're the dangerous? The geo-politics and ethics? All soundly covered. Found it fascinating, especially in terms of what is possible, imagining what the future human could look and be like and the kinds of choices parents could potentially need to make in future. It's a brave new world and I it feels like most of us aren't prepared for it...

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Couldn't get on with the narrator

Tried so hard with this but felt I missed a lot of learning due to the narrator sounding like a more annoying version of Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory. Really distracting.

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2 people found this helpful

eye opening

brilliant book loads of interesting ideas but the delivery is a bit tedious. still the book made my jaw drop to the fact we are now in a sci fi future.

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A must read for all those scientifically minded

This book is a great read and provides amazing thought experiments to really delve into at home it's extremely informative and is a real eye opener not just as to what our future holds technologically but also morally and ethically along with the potential traps we could fall to, I found my mind wondering for hours after each read (which I guess isn't hard) which only makes for better reading

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1 person found this helpful

Gets you thinking

Especially if you're considering having children, really affects how you will look at the decisions you make on a personal level

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An excellent book, shame about the narration.

This is an excellent and important work and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the near future. In many ways it's the book that I hoped the disappointing Homo Deus by Harari would be.
The audio-book narration however is truly dreadful, and I had to work hard not to let it distract me from the book's content. Imagine someone whose regular day job is doing voice-overs for cheesy American commercials who think it's necessary to do an impression of a Star Trek Vulcan because he's reading a science book.
Buy the printed version!

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Couldn’t make it past the first chapter

I am fascinated by the subject matter but the narrator is so grating I had to stop after 20 minutes.

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Bad science but engaging nonetheless

Many scientific inaccuracies and misunderstood concepts (eg the idea that height must be controlled by many genes because many individual parts of the body must grow more / less- rather, genes act to increase or decrease height via small effects on overall height via regulating many body parts at once, not one gene for your neck, one for your legs, etc.). Not written by a scientist, which may explain some of the mistakes, but publishers should have picked up on these given that this is a historian trying to write about science. Despite this, the broad ideas of the book are OK and it is engagingly written, just wouldn’t recommend if you really want to understand genetic modification.

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6 people found this helpful