Mutants: On the Form, Varieties and Errors of the Human Body is a book about the genetics behind human oddities. It's the companion to a Channel 4 documentary of the same title that aired this summer. The author, Armand Marie Leroi, is a biologist and lecturer at Imperial College London. From a review in The Guardian a few months back:
"There are three things that lift this book above mere exploitation: the seriousness of Leroi's scientific investigations; the humane concern he manifests for the suffering other; and the sensitivity of his aesthetic appreciation of the wonders of nature. "Beautiful" is a term frequently used to describe some bottled monster. This aesthetic appreciation extends to previous writers on the subject. He describes an account of the progress of a deer embryo by the 17th-century natural philosopher William Harvey (more famous for his discovery of the circulation of the blood) as "one of the loveliest descriptions of a mammalian foetus ever written".
I'll be in the UK next week and I'm definitely going to pick up a copy! Link
Update: BB reader Nolandda points out that the Mutants book is also available in the US with a slightly different title. Link
