Origins by Annie Murphy Paul

Origins by Annie Murphy Paul

What makes us the way we are? Some say it's the genes we inherit at conception. Others are sure it's the environment we experience in childhood. But could it be that many of our individual characteristics--our health, our intelligence, our temperaments--are influenced by the conditions we encountered before birth?

What makes us the way we are? Some say it's the genes we inherit at conception. Others are sure it's the environment we experience in childhood. But could it be that many of our individual characteristics--our health, our intelligence, our temperaments--are influenced by the conditions we encountered before birth?

That's the claim of an exciting and provocative field known as fetal origins. Over the past twenty years, scientists have been developing a radically new understanding of our very earliest experiences and how they exert lasting effects on us from infancy well into adulthood. Their research offers a bold new view of pregnancy as a crucial staging ground for our health, ability, and well-being throughout life.

Author and journalist Annie Murphy Paul ventures into the laboratories of fetal researchers, interviews experts from around the world, and delves into the rich history of ideas about how we're shaped before birth. She discovers dramatic stories: how individuals gestated during the Nazi siege of Holland in World War II are still feeling its consequences decades later; how pregnant women who experienced the 9/11 attacks passed their trauma on to their offspring in the womb; how a lab accident led to the discovery of a common household chemical that can harm the developing fetus; how the study of a century-old flu pandemic reveals the high personal and societal costs of poor prenatal experience.

Origins also brings to light astonishing scientific findings: how a single exposure to an environmental toxin may produce damage that is passed on to multiple generations; how conditions as varied as diabetes, heart disease, and mental illness may get their start in utero; why the womb is medicine's latest target for the promotion of lifelong health, from preventing cancer to reducing obesity. The fetus is not an inert being, but an active and dynamic creature, responding and adapting as it readies itself for life in the particular world it will enter. The pregnant woman is not merely a source of potential harm to her fetus, as she is so often reminded, but a source of influence on her future child that is far more powerful and positive than we ever knew. And pregnancy is not a nine-month wait for the big event of birth, but a momentous period unto itself, a cradle of individual strength and wellness and a crucible of public health and social equality.

With the intimacy of a personal memoir and the sweep of a scientific revolution, Origins presents a stunning new vision of our beginnings that will change the way you think about yourself, your children, and human nature itself.

ANNIE MURPHY PAUL is a well-known science writer whose work has appeared in a variety of journals, including the New York Times Magazine, Scientific American, and The Best American Science Writing. She is the author of Origins, which was named a New York Times Notable Book, and The Cult of Personality, which was acclaimed as a fascinating new book by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker. More than 2.6 million people have watched her TED Talk. Paul has received the Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellowship, the Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship, and the Bernard L. Johnson Journalism Fellowship. New America's Schwartz Fellowship She is a Learning Sciences Exchange Fellow at New America and a Yale University and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism graduate.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780743296625
ISBN 10	0743296621
Title	Origins
Author	Annie Murphy Paul
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Microfilm
Publisher	Simon & Schuster
Year published	2010-09-28
Number of pages	320
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.