Summary of Amy Webb & Andrew Hessel's The Genesis Machine

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

Book Preview: #1 Bill, a student in Duxbury, Massachusetts, was a gifted student with wide-ranging interests in photography, math, and journalism. But in other ways, he was unremarkable. He was constantly thirsty, and his parents took him to the doctor, who found that his blood sugar was elevated.

#2 Bill’s parents were told that it was just bad genes, but there was a silver lining: a treatment regimen that would require him to manually perform all the tasks that his body should have been doing automatically.

#3 The clinical symptoms of type 1 diabetes were first recorded some 3,000 years ago in Egypt. It was another 1,500 years before Aretaeus, a Cappadocian physician who spoke Greek, described a melting down of the flesh and limbs into urine, a condition he named diabetes after the Greek word for siphon.

#4 The treatment worked in dogs, and it was later used on humans. It was the discovery of insulin that changed the course of life for millions of people worldwide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Mar 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669359814

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Insights on Amy Webb & Andrew Hessel's The Genesis Machine

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Bill, a student in Duxbury, Massachusetts, was a gifted student with wide-ranging interests in photography, math, and journalism. But in other ways, he was unremarkable. He was constantly thirsty, and his parents took him to the doctor, who found that his blood sugar was elevated.

#2

Bill’s parents were told that it was just bad genes, but there was a silver lining: a treatment regimen that would require him to manually perform all the tasks that his body should have been doing automatically.

#3

The clinical symptoms of type 1 diabetes were first recorded some 3,000 years ago in Egypt. It was another 1,500 years before Aretaeus, a Cappadocian physician who spoke Greek, described a melting down of the flesh and limbs into urine, a condition he named diabetes after the Greek word for siphon.

#4

The treatment worked in dogs, and it was later used on humans. It was the discovery of insulin that changed the course of life for millions of people worldwide.

#5

In the 1950s, Eli Lilly began developing insulin from other sources, such as pigs and rats. It took 8,000 pounds of pancreas glands to make just one pound of insulin.

#6

There were two problems addressed by the group at Genentech, who were working on recombinant DNA technology. The first was the supply issue of human insulin, which could be solved by having engineered bacterial cells produce human insulin. The second was reprogramming bad genes to behave properly, which could be addressed in the future.

#7

As a startup, Genentech spent no money on creature comforts. It recruited a team of scientists fresh out of graduate school and put them together to synthesize the insulin molecule.

#8

The team at Genentech produced the exact DNA sequence, and an organism to execute commands, to produce human insulin. It was the birth of biotechnology and the genesis of a new field of science called synthetic biology.

#9

The human body is a collection of cellular factories that are controlled by DNA. Each factory has three main components: a set of instructions, a communications system to transmit those instructions, and a production line that makes the designated product.

#10

The genome is the operating system of life, and it is full of non-coding sequences that control which genes are turned on and off. It has been difficult to