?This is a beautiful book, elegantly written peacefully paced and easefully erudite.?

'Winner of the Guardian First Book Award 2004, MUTANTS is disturbing, fascinating and enlightening; in short, a remarkable book.'

How we grow; and what happens when mistakes occur Mutants is a book about how the body develops and grows from a single cell to an adult and then declines into old age. What does the new molecular genetics tell us about the human condition? How is a limb formed? Why do we have five fingers (and not six)? What controls the size to which we grow? Why do we age?More than this, however, it is a brilliant narrative history of what happens when things go wrong. This book tells, rather like a biological verison of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, the stories of particularly historically important and bizarre cases: of a French convent girl of the last century who found herself changing sex upon puberty and her miserable fate in the gutters of Paris; of children, invariably stillborn, who have cylopia (one eye located beneath their nasal cavity); of a tribe of pygmies in the Andaman Islands and a village of Ecuadorian dwarves: of a remarkably hairy family who were kept at the Burmese Royal Court for four generations (and from whom Darwin took one of his keenest insights into heredity); and so on. From each important lessons are drawn that illustrate over and over again the amazing nature of cellular growth and how it works.

Full of fascinating and bizarre cases of genetic mutation and irregularity, Mutants is an amazing exploration of the human form in all its beautiful and unique guises. Why are most of us born with one nose, two legs, ten fingers and twenty-four ribs -- and some of us not? Why do most of us stop growing in our teens -- while others just keep going? Why do some us have heads of red hair -- and others no hair at all? The human genome, we are told, makes us what we are. But how? Armand Marie Leroi takes us to the extremes of human mutation -- from the grotesque to the beautiful, and often both at the same time -- to explain how we become what we are. Through the tales of long-lived Croatian dwarves, ostrich-footed Wadoma tribesmen, sex-changing French convent girls, and many more wonders of human development, Leroi has written a brilliant narrative account of our genetic grammar and people whose bodies have revealed it.

Armand Leroi was born in 1964 in New Zealand, and has lived all over the world;. He has published widely in technical journals on evolutionary and developmental genetics, and is currently Reader in Evolutionary Developmental Biology at Imperial College London.

2006-10-27 Where are the diagrams?

Where are the diagrams? Within this book there are some quite complicated descriptions - e.g. of the developing foetus or cellular machinery - that would have benefited greatly from a diagram. That old adage "A picture paints a thousand words" isn't an old adage for nothing... And quoting French without giving a translation seems to be another one of the author's sins. Also, though unavoidably, this book is chock-full of horribly long Latin names for different syndromes and disorders that can be a bit tiring after a while. Having said that, Leroi writes wonderfully and is a welcome change from the often turgid prose of other popular science writers. Overall I think that I learned a lot from this book and I enjoyed it too. Read it and be amazed!