{"product_id":"mutants-book-armand-marie-leroi-9780007184576","title":"Mutants","description":"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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49579384832273,"sku":"GOR001300165","price":10.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50051528196369,"sku":"GOR006760435","price":10.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0007184573.jpg?v=1750842383","url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/products\/mutants-book-armand-marie-leroi-9780007184576","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}