A book like this only comes around once in a while—one never knows from which corner. This time it was written by the CTO of a next gen sequencing data analytics company.
“Every one of these cases was intense. It was just so fascinating that I had to put it down in a book and tell the story. There’s so much in biology that boggles your mind and makes you wonder.”
So says Ramesh Hariharan, author of Genomic Quirks: The Search for Spelling Errors. His new book tells the stories of nine cases he worked on first hand analyzing patient genomes. From the mystery of the author’s own color blindness to a rare childhood disease that took a couple’s two children and left them wondering whether to have another to a daunting instance of abdominal cancer, Ramesh reveals the interplay of three modern industries working at the their pinnacle: molecular biology, clinical medicine, and data analytics.
What makes the book so special is being with a passionate technologist as he discovers his own gift as a writer, to be there when he realizes he can bring the rest of us along on a journey filled with many fantastical twists and turns, dead ends and eureka moments, uncovering the long kept secrets of the human genome. This is different from the product of journalists who get it all second hand. Ramesh's book is personal, a labor of love, rare.
Does it all make him bullish on genomic medicine for the future? He says we’re running out of ideas.
