Biomedicine and the Human Condition

How to avoid disease, how to breed successfully and how to live to a reasonable age, are questions that have perplexed mankind throughout history. This book explores our progress in understanding these challenges, and the risks and rewards of our attempts to find solutions. From the moment of conception, nutrition and exposure to microbes or alien chemicals have consequences that are etched into our cells and genomes. Such events have a crucial impact on development in utero and in childhood, and later, on the way we age, respond to infection, or the likelihood of developing chronic diseases, including cancer. The issues covered include the powerful influence of infectious disease on human society, the burden of our genetic legacy and the lottery of procreation. The author discusses how prospects for human life might continually improve as biomedicine addresses these problems and also debates the ethical checkpoints encountered.

Spis treści:
Preface
1. Challenge, risk and reward, learning to control our biological fate
2. Learning to breed successfully
3. How life is handled
4. Cells in sickness and health
5. Experiences in utero affect later life
6. Infection, nutrition and poisons, avoiding an unhealthy life
7. Signs of ageing, when renovation slows
8. Cancer and the body plan, a Darwinian struggle
9. Fighting infection
10. Are devastating epidemics still possible?
11. Discovering medicines, infinite variety through chemistry
12. Protein medicines from gene technology
13. Refurbishing the body
14. Living with the genetic legacy
15. Epilogue.