If the minute details of you Biology and Chemistry courses have escaped your memory, you are in luck. Carl Zimmer’s scientific tome on Heredity reads like a full undergraduate course load. Despite the heady topic, Zimmer’s narrative style and use of intriguing historic allegories makes the book accessible for the layman and PhD alike. This book is a compelling look at the long and meandering thread that ties our earliest biological forms to the super human prospects of what we could look like tomorrow. For that reason you will want to sit with it and digest it slowly as I did for over a month. Zimmer painstakingly takes us through the the earliest stumbling blocks of research on heredity up through the cutting edge science of gene editing. Over the course of that journey some strong themes emerge. The perversion of Eugenics fueled by systemic and extreme racism. The potentials of genetic engineering for disease control and species protection along with restoration. The ethical quagmire that scientists work in while trying to push the envelope of knowledge and application. Each of these threads are presented in a way that reminds just how powerful the scientific process is but how flawed the discoveries become in human hands. That dilemma is what makes this book a must read. It is a stingy alarm bell and science fair in one. Teaching us to appreciate what we can learn through inquiry, define through testing, and create through experimentation. It also reminds us how dangerous it is to seek perfection and miss the obvious truth that genetic diversity and natural variants are what lead to evolutionary breakthroughs as well as safeguards from the stagnation of genetic homogeny. It pairs nicely with a viewing of Jurassic Park or Gattaca. Two great examples of the science discussed in this book creatively represented in action.