Download His Brother's Keeper: One Family's Journey to the Edge of Medicine AudioBook Free
From Jonathan Weiner, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of The Beak of the Finch, comes His Brother's Keeper -- the storyplot of a businessman who gambles on the dangerous knowledge of gene therapy to try to save his brother's life.Stephen Heywood was twenty-nine yrs . old when he found that he was dying of ALS -- Lou Gehrig's disease. Almost overnight his older brother, Jamie, changed himself into a hereditary engineer in a quixotic race to treat the incurable. His Brother's Keeper is a powerful account of the tale, as they travel together to the edge of medicine.The e book brings home for all those the hopes and concerns of the new biology. Within this remarkable and suspenseful narrative, Jonathan Weiner gives us a remarkable portrait of knowledge and medicine today. We find out about gene therapy, stem skin cells, brain vaccines, and other novel treatments for such nerve-death diseases as ALS, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's -- diseases that afflict thousands, and touch the lives of many more.As it happens that the author has an individual stake in the storyplot as well. When he found the Heywood brothers, his own mother was dying of an exceptional nerve-death disease. The Heywoods' gene therapist offered to make an effort to save her, too."The Heywoods' tale taught me a lot of things about the type of therapeutic in the new millennium," Weiner creates. "In addition they taught me in what has not changed since the time of the ancients and may never change as long as there are humans -- in what Lucretius calls ‘the ever-living wound of love.'"The Heywoods signify the whole tale if you ask me now: an allegory from the edge of medicine. A story to make us ask ourselves questions that we have to ask but do not want to ask. Just how much of life can we engineer? Just how much is allowed us?"What could you do to save your brother's life?"
