Chapter 15 - Sex
Ridley introduces this chapter by mentioning a five-year-old girl who has a rare inherited disease called Prader-Willi syndrome. The Prader-Willi syndrome has many symptoms like having small hands and feel or mildly mentally retarded. In the late 1980s there were two scientists who tried to have a mouse with only one parent, but failed because the method they used did not help develop the embryo. Ridley mentions that diseases " do not always result from a mutation in one of these genes but from an accident of a different kind." The placenta is an organ that a father's gene would not trust the mother's genes t make and then the cerebral cortex is the organ that is the other way around. Ridley then continued to talk about a boy who got a circumcision, but went wrong and changed the boy into a girl by castration. The boy grew up thinking he was a girl until his parents told him the truth.
Citation:
Ridley, Matt. Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. Print.
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