Best Comic Book About Genetics: "The Stuff of Life"

I will finish 2019 with an enthusiastic book recommendation! I read some interesting books on genetics this year: "The Tangled Tree" by David Quammen, and "She Has Her Mother's Laugh" by Carl Zimmer. I have also enjoyed "The Cartoon Guide to Genetics" by Larry Gonick, the dean of educational cartoonists.

But to get a clear mental picture of what exactly DNA is, how genes work, and what humans have learned about genetics and how they apply that information, you can do no better than:

"The Stuff of Life: A Graphic Guide to Genetics and DNA" by Mark Schultz, illustrated by Zander Cannon and Kevin Cannon.

Schultz and the two Cannons have earned a total of at least five Harvey Awards and four Eisner Awards for their graphic art, and their mastery of cartoons makes "The Stuff of Life" really entertaining and incredibly lucid. Asexual alien life forms are attending a lecture about that weird planet Earth and its penchant for sexual reproduction. While the reader is advised to "ask your mother" about actual intercourse, the process of creating genetic variation through meiosis and fertilization is presented through fascinating pictures and clear text.

This book acknowledges that biology and genetics are chock full of strange concepts and vocabulary, and it takes its sweet time to explain the processes and their individual parts. I learn through mental pictures, and it's very helpful for me to see slightly anthropomorphized characters doing their biological jobs.

The book also patiently explains all the levels to this biology: that chromosomes are made up of macromolecules, which are made up of genes, which are made up of nucleotides, which are made up of molecules. And you not only learn about the differences, but you can easily visualize them as well!

The book then clearly explains questions like: How are traits and characteristics passed down the generations? How are genes expressed or not expressed? How do we genetically modify organisms? How exactly does gene therapy work?

Finally, there's a great explanation of the "Out of Africa" theory of human expansion, as we learned from studying uniparental markers (Y-chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA). 

There's also this beautiful family tree stemming from Y-Chromosomal Adam (I'm in Haplogroup R1b):

And this family tree stemming from mtDNA Eve (I'm in Haplogroup H):

You can also loan this book for free from the incredible Internet Archive, so make it a new year's resolution to give this book a read!

The only downside to "The Stuff of Life" is that it was published in 2008, and the reader misses out on an exciting decade of genetics research. Fortunately, Insitome's podcast "The Insight" just released a worthwhile double-length episode on the "Top 10 human genetics and evolution developments of the 2010s." Ancient DNA plays a pivotal role in this genetics review, as it taught us how exactly Neanderthals are related to humans, how the completely unknown species known as Denisovans are also an ancestral population, and how huamn populations have migrated and blended through the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, and classical antiquity.

Here's to all the exciting discoveries in genetics and my own personal research that will come in the 2020s!

Questions? Comments? Please email me at ruedafingerhut [at] gmail.com.