Mutants
by Armand Marie Leroi
Harper Perennial $144
People with red hair are mutants. Their MC1R receptors are inactive and, instead of making brown or black pigments, make only red. It's an unusual northern European trait not found elsewhere and shared with red setters, red foxes and red Highland cattle. Toulouse-Lautrec believed redheads had an especially erotic odour, but Armand Marie Leroi, a biologist at the Imperial College London, concludes that red hair has no useful function and declares it a decaying gene going the way of eyes in blind cave fish. 'We are all mutants,' writes Leroi. 'But some of us are more mutant than others.' Mutants is about genetic variation, and it may come as a surprise to know that each of us is born with about 100 genetic mutations our parents didn't have. This readable book is part medical history, part science. It explains genetics in clear terms, and how our DNA operates, from a fetus already encoded with beauty, to a death increasingly delayed as medicine learns more about why the body dies. Leroi also writes with compassion about mutants in history and how incredible it is that fewer accidents occur.
