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"Intimate in scale yet epic in scope." It is these words in the blurb that gathered my attention. This is an intimate family story involving a mother and her children that will ultimately become a global one.

I have always wondered how some authors or directors are able to portray an intimate story involving two or three individuals in a global sci-fi novel. Christopher Nolan showed us how to make an epic movie out of a father's promise to his daughter. Blake Crouch creates similar magic through this novel.

The story revolves around Logan Ramsay, who is working in GPA (Gene Protection Agency) and is ready to destroy all the dark gene labs. One of the raids he conducted goes wrong, causing Logan to be exposed to an unknown virus that initially seems harmless but later starts upgrading his genome. Was it a planned attack or just a random raid gone wrong? Has Logan's family history got any connection to this upgrade? What will happen to him after the upgrade? What are the positives and negatives that Logan will have to face due to this upgrade? Is Logan the lonely person upgraded, or is he the first to get upgraded? Multiple questions like these crop up in the readers' minds when we read this novel. The author carefully considers all these questions and answers each one in the most convincing manner.

This book is packed with a lot of Scientific information like all the other books written by the author (I recommend you to read the Dark Matter and Recursion, the two other novels written by the author which are also discussing some mind-bending concepts). Genetics is one of my favorite topics, and I am glad to see the meticulous research the author did in writing this book.

What I learned from this book
1) Can the books we read hold our genetic information?
This will be an interesting fact to read, especially for bibliophiles who love reading physical books. The author is saying how our genetic information can be trapped in each page we read and how it can be viewed by putting each page under a black light lamp.

"Vast amounts of DNA, or plasmids, could be hidden on the pages of a normal book—dropped in microliter increments and left to dry on the pages, only to be rehydrated and used elsewhere. Even a short novel like The Stranger could hold a near-infinite amount of genetic information, with each page hiding the genome sequence for a different mammal, a terrifying disease, or a synthetic species, any of which could be activated in a well-equipped dark gene lab."

2) What are the techniques used in gene editing, and what are the dangers associated with it?

We can indubitably say this is the most important topic discussed in this novel. Gene editing is the process that enables Scientists to change an organism's DNA. We can see a new (fictional) DNA modifier system called Scythe, discovered by Logan's mother. Blake Crouch tells how it is better than the current (real world) techniques used for the same. He also mentions the dangers of genome editing if not used judiciously in this novel.

He is predicting one of the major dilemmas we will face in the near future if we progress at this pace without giving much importance to the ethics.

"Scythe was the revolutionary, biological DNA modifier system—now extremely illegal—discovered and patented by my mother, Miriam Ramsay. It had been a seismic leap forward that left the previous generations of technologies—ZFNs, TALENs, CRISPR-Cas9—gasping in the dust. Scythe had ushered in a new era of gene editing and delivery, one that brought about catastrophic results, which was why getting caught using or selling it for germline modification—the making of a new organism—came with a mandatory thirty-year prison sentence."

3) Will artificial intelligence pose the biggest threat to humankind in the future?
Artificial intelligence is helping us a lot in our daily life. We should be grateful to those working on developing it as it makes us deal with our everyday life more easily. But what will be the case of it in the future? Will it pose a serious threat to our existence? The author is trying to discuss this topic elaborately in this novel.

"We lived in a veritable surveillance state, engaged with screens more than with our loved ones, and the algorithms knew us better than we knew ourselves. Every passing year, more jobs were lost to automation and artificial intelligence.

4) Which will be the toughest job for a human being in the future?
According to Blake Crouch, being a Genetic Engineer will be the toughest job a human can do in the future. If we don't value the ethical aspects of scientific experiments, there is a high probability that the author's prediction can happen in the future.

We can see a Nobel prize shortlisted Genetic engineer getting arrested due to the panic created by the scrupulous activities of some unethical rogue geneticists in this book. We can see a person trying to clone an improved version of his dead wife or parents who attempted to edit their son's muscular dystrophy to cure his disease, sadly making him a psychotic person who killed them before committing suicide. We can also see extreme versions of terrorism where weaponized life-forms of destruction by synthesizing ultra-smallpox relatives.

"The ones that hurt were the raids on real scientists. Those who'd been doing groundbreaking work, for all humankind, when governments panicked and made it practically impossible to be a genetic engineer."

5) Will pain dilate time perception?
When we are watching a boring movie or reading a poorly written book, we might feel that the time seems to be running very slowly. Similarly, we will feel the same when we have severe pain due to a medical condition. A few studies have shown the relation between time and pain. It is one of those difficult studies where it is tough to come to a conclusion. We can see the author trying to tell us the relation between pain and time in this novel.

“Pain distorts time, so I had no idea how much of it had passed when I finally heard the thunder of footsteps descending the stairs into the basement.��

6) What is interferon gamma?
We can see the Logan describing about interferon gamma in this book. Interferons are glycoproteins normally synthesised by virus-infected cells, exhibiting a wide range of antiviral and antitumoral properties.

They are classified mainly into three
Interferon alpha - used to treat Chronic Hepatitis B and C, Kaposi sarcoma, hairy cell leukaemia, malignant melanoma, renal cell carcinoma, condyloma acuminatum (genital warts).

Interferon beta - used to treat multiple sclerosis.

Interferon gamma - used to treat chronic granulomatous disease.

"They started me on a course of interferon-gamma and a set of new antivirals. I spiked one more fever the following night and then began a period of rapid improvement. My energy roared back. My appetite returned. I started sleeping through the night."

7) Why were the empathy and love shown by our loved ones during our quarantine very important?
We had seen multiple cases where the mothers, wives, fathers, husbands, daughters, and sons sacrificed their safety to make us comfortable when we were in quarantine battling the deadly coronavirus during the pandemic. We also have to remember that there was not even a single vaccine, and the hospitals were oversaturated with patients during the initial phase of the pandemic. Most of us are still alive only because of the love, care, and moral support shown by our loved ones during the time of crisis during the pandemic. The author beautifully conveys this emotional aspect through this novel.

"It moved me that Ava would suit up to spend time with me inside my bubble. If you weren't used to them, a hazmat suit could be a claustrophobic experience. They were hot and bulky, and inevitably your face would begin to itch the moment you had entered the quarantine area. And, of course, looming over all of the inconvenience was the very real threat of a breach."

8) What is z-score?
z- scores compare a person's bone density with the average bone density of people of the same age, sex, and body size

"Nothing's wrong per se. There's a metric called the z-score, which measures bone mineral density. Anything between ��1 and 1 is within the range of normal. Your z-score is 2.75."

"Is that high?"

He chuckled. "In my entire career, I've never seen bones this dense. This could explain the deep body pain you've been experiencing if they were undergoing a cycle of densification."

"What would cause an uptick in bone density?"

“Bad things. Diffusely metastatic prostate cancer, Paget’s disease, pyknodysostosis, osteopetrosis.��

9) What does the inhibition of PDE4B do?
PDE4B gene encodes the enzyme cAMP-specific 3',5'-cyclic phosphodiesterase 4B. The significance of this inhibition is discussed in detail in this book.

"I shouldn't have known, but as I considered the question, I remembered reading an article eight years ago in Scientific American, where PDE4B had been discussed in the context of gene therapies for mental illness. I said, "It's linked to low anxiety and high problem solving . Well, at least in mice." "Correct. It's been inhibited in you. What if I were to tell you that your entire IGF system had also been altered and your GRIN2B gene mutated?"

10) What is polygraph test?
Polygraph test or the lie detector test records physiological phenomena such as blood pressure, pulse rate, and respiration of a person when he answers questions put to him by an operator

"I knew from my own experience in law enforcement that lie-detector tests don't actually detect lies. They detect guilty feelings, which most people experience when they lie, evidenced by dramatic swings in the metrics the tablet facing me was designed to track."

11) What is sensory gating?
Sensory gating is the capability of the human brain to separate irrelevant stimuli from relevant ones.

"What allows human beings to concentrate on things amid the maelstrom of infinite stimuli is a neurological process called sensory gating. It filters out low-relevance (redundant or unnecessary) stimuli in the brain from all possible environmental stimuli. If this didn't happen, we would experience an overload of irrelevant information in the higher cortical centers.

The absence of sensory gating is a key marker for schizophrenia and actually contributes to making people go insane. An existence without gating would be torture.��

12) What are prions?
Prions are proteins that can cause disease by abnormally folding proteins in the brain. Rapidly progressive dementia seen in Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease caused by prion is a serious medical condition.

"Prions are misfolded proteins that carry a horrifying ability to catalytically transmit their misfolded shape onto normal variants of the same protein. These mutations cause normal proteins in the brain to misfold. They literally shred brain matter and cause a handful of horror-show neurodegenerative diseases. Victims lose their ability to recognize people and places and to take care of themselves. In the final stages, they cease to think at all.

They cause But I watched in horror as the list of "50%��95% overlap" results scrolled by: scrapie, mad cow disease, camel spongiform encephalopathy (CSE), transmissible mink encephalopathy (TME), chronic wasting disease (CWD), feline spongiform encephalopathy (FSE), exotic ungulate encephalopathy (EUE), spongiform encephalopathy, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), Gerstmann-Sträussler-Scheinker disease (GSS), fatal familial insomnia (FFI), kuru, variably protease-sensitive prionopathy (VPSPr) and many other diseases."

13) What is R0 or R-naught?
R0, in simple terms, can be described as the disease's spreadability.

That was a very big number. In virology, the R0 (R-naught) indicates the contagion level of a given illness. It's the number of cases expected to be caused by a single infected person. Measles, the most contagious virus known to humankind, has an R0 of 12 to 18, which means that each infected person would be expected to infect 12 to 18 others. By comparison, the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed fifty million, had a much lower R0 of between 1.4 to 2.8. COVID-19 had been around 5.7. "

My favourite three lines from this book

“The greatest threat to our species lies within us.��

"Creatures who overlay story on everything, but especially their own lives, and in so doing, can imbue a cold, random, sometimes brutal existence, with fabricated meaning."

“But more than anything, I didn’t want to become someone’s lab rat.��

What could have been better?
There is too much Medical jargon in this book. Few of them I felt were unnecessary. For example, the author mentions the strain developed in Logan's adductor policies, first dorsal interosseus, and flexor policies brevis. He could have easily said it in a simpler way, like Logan was finding strain in his hand. I was ok with all the medical jargon as I am familiar with most of them. But I don't know about the case of others who are not too accustomed to these terms.

We can't point it out as a severe negative, though, as this book is written in a way that can be deciphered and enjoyed by everyone in their own way, even if they don't understand some of the scientific concepts mentioned in it.

Rating
5/5 This is a must-read book if you like to read sci-fi novels. I think this book and another book called Sea of Tranquility will probably win most of the awards in the sci-fi category this year.