64 Books Like A Crack In Creation

This book helped me release shame after a colleague of mine told me my work wasn’t “science.”

Here’s the truth: to create a healing platform, I needed to tap into ways of thinking that academia sees as “woo woo” and “savage.” I looked to the stars. I meditated. I did rituals and read myths.

Dr. Kimmerer, trained as a traditional botanist, realized that the Indigenous myths and stories she was told as a child contained scientific knowledge passed down for generations by her tribe.

She realized there were scientific truths her community knew for millennia that traditional scientists only discovered within the last 100 years. This is the power of Ancestral Intelligence, disregarded by the same science that ultimately created AI.

What stories, fables, and myths have taught you valuable lessons about the world?

I love this book because it turns the most impactful science discovery of the 21st century–CRISPR gene editing–into a page-turner. Isaacson combines a biography of Jennifer Doudna, who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Emmanuelle Charpentier, with lucid accounts of the science and sequence of research breakthroughs that underlie CRISPR editing, as well as the intrigues and jockeying among powerful scientists and personalities vying for prizes and patents on the technology.

I came through this book to appreciate the enormous potential of CRISPR gene editing for good (curing hereditary diseases) and not-so-good (designer babies or, in the words of Vladimir Putin, “a soldier, an individual who can fight without fear or compassion, mercy or pain”). CRISPR promises to make human selection as important as natural selection in the evolution of many species, including humans.

Once upon a time, we were unaware of DNA. We could tell that taller parents have taller kids, we could select tomato plants for sweeter fruit, and we could even construct plausible relationships between long-extinct animals and their descendants. Still, the nature of the stuff from which these links are made and how it works or fails to work remained a mystery.

Solving this mystery is one of humanity’s most remarkable achievements, and Mukherjee tells the tale with style and humor, weaving in recollections of his family’s encounters with mental illness. Despite my familiarity with the end result, the modern picture of genes, I found much of the history surprising and surprisingly colorful, full of dead ends and creative leaps. The last third of the book, on complex traits like intelligence and illnesses like schizophrenia, isn’t quite as good as the rest, but that takes us to our second… show more.

This is the classic personal account of the discovery of the structure of DNA. I read it as an early college assignment, but now find it rich in history, biology, and insight. Watson described himself as an ornithology undergraduate who avoided chemistry and physics courses in spite of a desire to do science—a common sentiment. He unfolds in frank detail how the world of science worked, and sometimes didn’t work, early post-WWII. We learn as much about bond angles and hydration as we do about laboratory politics and personality quirks beneath the effort to puzzle out the structure and function of DNA. The epilogue pays tribute to less well-known collaborators, especially Rosalind Franklin, sometimes dismissed as uncooperative, but recognized here for her essential contributions and competence as a scientist.

The meaning of evolution, the foundation of creativity, the nature of consciousness—nobody can write so clearly and evocatively about these things as Oliver Sacks did over his long and productive career. This book offers a fresh look into the mind of a big thinker. Sacks explores issues and ideas across a remarkable breadth of disciplines. Here, he delved into questions most people probably have never thought to ask about evolution, botany, medicine, as well as the arts. He explores the science and humanity in everything, including his own growing awareness of memory loss. Having read most of his other books, I found this one as new and novel and enlightening as the first I came across decades ago.  

You will never look at an oak tree in the same way after reading The Nature of Oaks.

Tallamay shares so much fascinating info about a tree most of us take for granted. No other tree species supports so many different kinds of animals. From tiny wasps to white-tailed deer, everyone in the forest relies on oak trees.

Whenever I walk past a tall oak tree, I feel like I know so much more about its life and the hidden world it supports. I’m in on a huge secret that started with a tiny acorn.

This book starts and ends with the story of Dr. Jiankui He, the infamous Chinese researcher responsible for the first CRISPR experiment resulting in genetically modified children.

It chronicles Dr. He’s “meteoric rise to fame” followed by his “dramatic fall from grace.”

In telling this story Kirksey, a cultural anthropologist, entertains the reader with details about interesting characters he meets and places he visits in his quest to both situate this debacle in relation to earlier efforts at genetic engineering and cell therapy in the United States and to confirm some of the contested details about what did or did not happen in China in the years leading up to this “first”.

Along the way, Kirksey lays bare salient facts about conflicts of interests among scientists, the corporate world’s vaunted pursuit of profit, and the ways in which nationalistic aspirations seed unhealthy competition.

Somewhat paradoxically, this treatise against genetic enhancement starts with the case of a deaf couple who want to have a deaf child.

This is a case I often discuss in exploring the difference between disease, disability, and diversity. Following on from this case description, Sandel asks, “Is it wrong to make a child deaf by design?” And what if the desired trait was not deafness but height, athletic prowess, health, or intelligence, and the aim was to gain a competitive advantage?

Would your answer be the same? In the pages that follow, Sandel builds a case against “reengineering our nature” grounded in an ethic of giftedness (i.e., a reverence for life as a gift).

He eschews the drive to mastery and insists that “[t]o appreciate children as gifts is to accept them as they come, not as objects of our design, or products of our will, or instruments of our… show more.

This work of fiction highlights the potential dangers of genetic engineering.

It invites the reader to imagine a world in which it is possible to genetically modify early-stage human embryos, making changes that will determine the life-trajectory of the newborn.

In this world, Dr. Saul Kramer, a geneticist, and the head of a successful IVF clinic, uses CRISPR technology not to correct disease-causing genes in unhealthy embryos, but rather to insert a gene for a fatal genetic disease into healthy embryos.

Children born of these genetically modified embryos die in the first year of life. Notably, this is not a whodunnit, but a morality tale framed around the question of whether Dr. Kramer is a murderer. 

Many assert that “science is outpacing ethics.”

In my book I argue that this claim is false and disingenuous. Consider this one example. Forty years ago, Glover anticipated the myriad ways in which genetic and neuro technologies might “change the central framework of human life.”

In this prescient book, Glover anticipates the use of genetic engineering and advocates caution as well as gradualness. Avoiding the risk of irreversible disaster is a priority. Glover outlines the drawbacks of centralized decision-making as well as the problems with piecemeal, short-term decision-making.

He enjoins us to reflect on what sort of people there should be and what sort of future we should try to bring about. My own work focuses on what kind of world we want to live in and, as such, we are kindred spirits.