HAVE YOU EVER wondered what makes you, You? Join Poppy on her journey into the fascinating world of her genetics. Learn how Poppy's genes created her red hair and blue eyes -- and trace these traits through her family tree. Poppy's genes are not the only things that help make her unique. discover, with Poppy, how your genes and the world around you can shape who you are. - What makes you unique? - Why do you look like your family? - What do genes have to do with it? Join Poppy to find out answers to these questions and more.

How tiny variations in our personal DNA can determine how we look, how we behave, how we get sick, and how we get well. News stories report almost daily on the remarkable progress scientists are making in unraveling the genetic basis of disease and behavior. Meanwhile, new technologies are rapidly reducing the cost of reading someone's personal DNA (all six billion letters of it). Within the next ten years, hospitals may present parents with their newborn's complete DNA code along with her footprints and APGAR score. In Genetic Twists of Fate, distinguished geneticists Stanley Fields and Mark Johnston help us make sense of the genetic revolution that is upon us. Fields and Johnston tell real life stories that hinge on the inheritance of one tiny change rather than another in an individual's DNA: a mother wrongly accused of poisoning her young son when the true killer was a genetic disorder; the screen siren who could no longer remember her lines because of Alzheimer's disease; and the president who was treated with rat poison to prevent another heart attack. In an engaging and accessible style, Fields and Johnston explain what our personal DNA code is, how a few differences in its long list of DNA letters makes each of us unique, and how that code influences our appearance, our behavior, and our risk for such common diseases as diabetes or cancer.

Experiments which in previous years were made with ornamental plants have already afforded evidence that the hybrids, as a rule, are not exactly intermediate between the parental species. With some of the more striking characters, those, for instance, which relate to the form and size of the leaves, the pubescence of the several parts, etc., the intermediate, indeed, is nearly always to be seen; in other cases, however, one of the two parental characters is so preponderant that it is difficult, or quite impossible, to detect the other in the hybrid. from 4. The Forms of the Hybrid One of the most influential and important scientific works ever written, the 1865 paper Experiments in Plant Hybridisation was all but ignored in its day, and its author, Austrian priest and scientist GREGOR JOHANN MENDEL (18221884), died before seeing the dramatic long-term impact of his work, which was rediscovered at the turn of the 20th century and is now considered foundational to modern genetics. A simple, eloquent description of his 18561863 study of the inheritance of traits in pea plantsMendel analyzed 29,000 of themthis is essential reading for biology students and readers of science history. Cosimo presents this compact edition from the 1909 translation by British geneticist WILLIAM BATESON (18611926).