A doctor extracted some blood from my arm; sent it to the laboratory at Vanderbilt University; and then, two weeks later, a CD-ROM came back in the mail, listing thousands of my genes. Holding this disk in my hands gave me a funny feeling, knowing that it contained a partial blueprint for my body. In principle, this disk could be used to create a reasonable copy of myself. But it also piqued my curiosity, since the secrets of my body were contained on that CD-ROM. For example, I could see if I had a particular gene that increased my chances of getting Alzheimer’s disease. I was concerned,
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