Dernière sortie
THE EXPOSOME
Every disease you will ever develop has two causes: your genome and your exposome. Medicine has spent the past century studying the first one. The genome - the sequence of three billion DNA base pairs you inherited at conception - has been mapped, sequenced, and scrutinised at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars. And what the data consistently shows is this: genetics explain approximately 5% of the risk of the chronic diseases that are killing people.
The other 95% is the exposome: the totality of everything your body has ever encountered, from the moment your parents' cells began forming the egg and sperm that became you, to the air you breathed this morning. This book is about the 95%. The Exposome takes readers on a journey through the most transformative science of the 21st century - the emerging field that is establishing, with molecular precision, how the air you breathe, the food you eat, the noise that enters your bedroom at night, the stress you carry, the neighbourhood you live in, and the screens your children use are continuously rewriting your biology.
Not metaphorically. Literally: altering the pattern of chemical marks on your DNA, reshaping the architecture of your brain, recalibrating the immune system of children who have not yet been born. Beginning before birth - with the startling discovery that the biological record of a human life begins in the chemistry of the egg and sperm, before conception occurs - and tracing forward through the first 1, 000 days, childhood, adolescence, midlife, and old age, The Exposome maps the specific mechanisms through which the modern world enters the body and what it does once it is there.
You will discover: Why a chemical produced by car tyres, transformed by rain and ozone, kills coho salmon in pristine-looking water - and what the same principle means for the chemistry in your blood How a single night of aircraft noise, even when you believe you are sleeping through it, measurably damages the lining of your blood vessels Why trees within 25 metres of your home have a different neurological effect than trees 300 metres away - measurable in MRI grey matter volume How the social media account your child keeps secret carries nearly double the odds of a suicide attempt compared with one their parents can see - regardless of what is posted on it What the centenarians of Okinawa, Sardinia, and Ikaria are doing, biologically, that modern medicine has spent decades failing to replicate with supplements How machine learning models trained on variables including how often you nap, when you finished your education, and how frequently you feel tense can predict cardiovascular disease twelve years before it occurs - without a blood test The Exposome is also a book about what is coming.
AI-driven chemical identification. Digital Twins that simulate a specific individual's biological future. Wearable devices that measure arterial stiffness in real time. A Human Exposome Project that will do for environmental medicine what the Human Genome Project did for genetics - and reveal, in the process, that the environmental record written into human tissue is not fate. It is a record. And records can be changed.
For readers of Why We Sleep, The Body, Spoon-Fed, and The Molecule of More - and for anyone who has ever wondered why some people age faster, get sicker, or recover more slowly than others who appear, on the surface, to live similar lives. The answer has been there all along. It is just becoming legible.
The other 95% is the exposome: the totality of everything your body has ever encountered, from the moment your parents' cells began forming the egg and sperm that became you, to the air you breathed this morning. This book is about the 95%. The Exposome takes readers on a journey through the most transformative science of the 21st century - the emerging field that is establishing, with molecular precision, how the air you breathe, the food you eat, the noise that enters your bedroom at night, the stress you carry, the neighbourhood you live in, and the screens your children use are continuously rewriting your biology.
Not metaphorically. Literally: altering the pattern of chemical marks on your DNA, reshaping the architecture of your brain, recalibrating the immune system of children who have not yet been born. Beginning before birth - with the startling discovery that the biological record of a human life begins in the chemistry of the egg and sperm, before conception occurs - and tracing forward through the first 1, 000 days, childhood, adolescence, midlife, and old age, The Exposome maps the specific mechanisms through which the modern world enters the body and what it does once it is there.
You will discover: Why a chemical produced by car tyres, transformed by rain and ozone, kills coho salmon in pristine-looking water - and what the same principle means for the chemistry in your blood How a single night of aircraft noise, even when you believe you are sleeping through it, measurably damages the lining of your blood vessels Why trees within 25 metres of your home have a different neurological effect than trees 300 metres away - measurable in MRI grey matter volume How the social media account your child keeps secret carries nearly double the odds of a suicide attempt compared with one their parents can see - regardless of what is posted on it What the centenarians of Okinawa, Sardinia, and Ikaria are doing, biologically, that modern medicine has spent decades failing to replicate with supplements How machine learning models trained on variables including how often you nap, when you finished your education, and how frequently you feel tense can predict cardiovascular disease twelve years before it occurs - without a blood test The Exposome is also a book about what is coming.
AI-driven chemical identification. Digital Twins that simulate a specific individual's biological future. Wearable devices that measure arterial stiffness in real time. A Human Exposome Project that will do for environmental medicine what the Human Genome Project did for genetics - and reveal, in the process, that the environmental record written into human tissue is not fate. It is a record. And records can be changed.
For readers of Why We Sleep, The Body, Spoon-Fed, and The Molecule of More - and for anyone who has ever wondered why some people age faster, get sicker, or recover more slowly than others who appear, on the surface, to live similar lives. The answer has been there all along. It is just becoming legible.
