“My mind is bent to tell of bodies changed to other forms.”
– OVID, Metamorphoses
welcome to the wonderful world of mutants. this book jumped out at me several months ago while i was looking for a book for a customer in the science section (a section i don’t get to spend much time in). while science in general doesn’t usually pique my interest, mutations and deformities do.
i’ll admit that some of the information in this book is over my head as i was not a very good student and remember nothing from my high school science classes. mutants goes through several different genetic disorders explaining the history behind them and the genetic process which our bodies go through to cause the deformities.
“Some of us, by chance, are born with an unusually large number of mildly deleterious mutations, while 
others are born with rather few. And some of us, by chance, are born with just one mutation of devastating effect where most of us are not. Who, then, are the mutants? There can be only one answer, and it is one that is consistent with out everyday experience of the normal and the pathological. We are all mutants. But some of us are more mutant than other.”
who isn’t fascinated by conjoined twins?
how about limbs with no bones?
or what about hands with an extra set of fingers?
“The single eye of a cyclopic child is the external sign of a disorder that reaches deep within the skull. All normal vertebrates have split brains. We, most obviously, have left and right cerebral hemispheres that we invoke when speaking of our left or right ‘brains’. Cyclopic infants do not. Instead of two distinct cerebral hemispheres, two optic lobes and two olofactory lobes, their forebrains are fused into an apparently indivisible whole. Indeed, clinicians call this whole spectrum of birth defects the ‘holoprosencephaly series’, from the Greek: holo – whole, prosencephalon – forebrain. It is, in all its manifestations, the most common brain deformity in humans, afflicting 1 in 16,000 live-born 
children and 1 in 200 miscarried foetuses.”
1 in every 200 miscarriages is a cyclops. damn.
“Neck lobes, however, occur not only in goats but also, albeit rarely, in humans. In 1858 a British physician by the name of Birkett published a short paper describing a seven-year-old girl who had been brought to him with a pair protruding stiffly from either side of her neck. The girl had had them since birth. Birkett was not sure what they were, but he cut them off anyway and put them under the microscope, where he discovered that they were auricles-an extra pair of external ears.”
“At day 37 after conception our extremities are as webbed as the feet of a duck. Over the next few days the cells in the webs die (as they do not in ducks) so that our digits may live free. Should a foetus have too much FGF signalling in its limbs, cells that should die don’t. Such a foetus, or rather the child it becomes, has fingers and toes bound together so that the hand or foot looks as if it is wearing a mitten made of skin.”
by Zita
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