Survival Of The Sickest By Sharon Moalem
In Survival of the Sickest, Dr. Sharon Moalem explores how harmful hereditary diseases that are still around in present day have survived through generations. He begins his journey into the world of medicine, genetics, evolution, and the influence of environment when he started looking into his grandfather’s strange love for donating blood and later his diagnosis with Alzheimer’s disease. Beginning at the age of fifteen years old he was determined to find answers and make connections. It wasn’t until years later that he put all the pieces together. Along the way he discovered incredible connections and reasons why so many hereditary diseases are still alive today. He organizes the novel into eight chapters that go into examining different hereditary
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diseases, their origin, how they are passed on, how they work, and their benefit to survival, which in result has contributed to their presence in the gene pool.
He also talks about how the environment around us also plays a role in human evolution and how our genes have come to be.
Throughout the novel, Moalem explains how certain hereditary diseases that are harmful to us and don’t make sense evolutionary are actually beneficial and were beneficial at a point in time. He begins by presenting us with a simple scenario that people might encounter everyday; taking pills. But he goes on to ultimately ask why would an individual take a pill that could kill them in forty years. And the answer was so that they don’t die tomorrow. To support this argument he talks about an inherited disease, hemochromatosis. Hemochromatosis is when our bodies absorb iron uncontrollably because it doesn’t think it has enough to the point where our joints hurt and become “rusted,” organs become
damaged, and the body’s overall chemistry is out of balance. While this sounds deteriorating and it is if it’s left unchecked because it can lead to death, there is an upside. Individuals with hemochromatosis have excess iron in their bodies, but it’s not distributed evenly. Specifically, the iron lacks in the white blood cells called macrophages, which help us fight off infections in the body. Because they lack iron, they are more able to kill what comes their way because a lot of infectious agents like to feed off our iron and when there isn’t enough to feed off of they can be eliminated more easily. So while hemochromatosis might kill someone by his or her middle age, Moalem reminds us that it does give an advantage to those individuals in fighting off infections. Circling back to his argument, that the inherited disease helped certain individuals survive the bubonic plague. He explains in the historical context that hemochromatosis might have originated in the 14th century to fight off iron deficiency in poorly nourished people.
diseases, their origin, how they are passed on, how they work, and their benefit to survival, which in result has contributed to their presence in the gene pool.
He also talks about how the environment around us also plays a role in human evolution and how our genes have come to be.
Throughout the novel, Moalem explains how certain hereditary diseases that are harmful to us and don’t make sense evolutionary are actually beneficial and were beneficial at a point in time. He begins by presenting us with a simple scenario that people might encounter everyday; taking pills. But he goes on to ultimately ask why would an individual take a pill that could kill them in forty years. And the answer was so that they don’t die tomorrow. To support this argument he talks about an inherited disease, hemochromatosis. Hemochromatosis is when our bodies absorb iron uncontrollably because it doesn’t think it has enough to the point where our joints hurt and become “rusted,” organs become
damaged, and the body’s overall chemistry is out of balance. While this sounds deteriorating and it is if it’s left unchecked because it can lead to death, there is an upside. Individuals with hemochromatosis have excess iron in their bodies, but it’s not distributed evenly. Specifically, the iron lacks in the white blood cells called macrophages, which help us fight off infections in the body. Because they lack iron, they are more able to kill what comes their way because a lot of infectious agents like to feed off our iron and when there isn’t enough to feed off of they can be eliminated more easily. So while hemochromatosis might kill someone by his or her middle age, Moalem reminds us that it does give an advantage to those individuals in fighting off infections. Circling back to his argument, that the inherited disease helped certain individuals survive the bubonic plague. He explains in the historical context that hemochromatosis might have originated in the 14th century to fight off iron deficiency in poorly nourished people.