Clinical geneticist, genetic pathologist, lecturer in genetics, and possessor of a genome Edwin Kirk, has released The Genes That Make Us: human stories from a revolution in medicine. This new book sets out to share the experiences and anecdotes of a career in genetic medicine more than two-decades long, while narrating segments of the history of genetic pathology and exploring the world of genes today and to come.

The book consists of 12 chapters, which read more like a selection of topics and anecdotes than the curated teleology of something like Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens. Nonetheless, it starts with the early history, muddles through many topics in the grey near-past-present-future of today and ends with a cautious assessment of the future. Still over the course of The Genes That Make Us, I found myself accumulating a familiarity with the subject that even facilitated riveting blow-by-blow discussions with local Masters students in genetics!

Kirk manages to reduce an opaque and erudite science, through analogies and cut-through explanations, to something understandable. But it must be said that pop science has its limits, and The Genes That Make Us pushes them. Although I found myself able to effectively follow most of the material for the purposes of the author with a high-school understanding of biology and chemistry, I fear that for the complexity of the topic you may not find a much clearer explanation elsewhere.

With this said, the science of genes is largely not so much the point of Kirk's writing as it is a pretext for the stories and history of genetics as human - a human science, a human project, a human fact and a human medical tool at the centre of human stories. No doubt drawing on his skill as a lecturer, Kirk balances academic rigour with a coy and delightfully grounded sense of humour: advising readers, for example, that "a test result which says your body might not tolerate alcohol very well is not nearly as definitive as having a few drinks to see what happens (in the name of science of course)". Kirk makes effective use of footnotes to deflate the academic style and maintain a sense of personality and fun.

And yet, this is not a book I would lightly recommend to anyone with inclinations of hypochondria (who are already having a bit of a time of it at the moment), or for that matter any prospective or expecting parents. Kirk acknowledges the twinges of fear and paranoia that his accounts of often fatalist genetic pathologies can elicit. The areas of Kirk's concern are the times when medicine is called to be involved - that is when something is or may be wrong - and it is often the keystone of Kirk's practice that the promises of genes are hard and unkind. These are the stories that become quite familiar in this book.

This is neither to say that it is a book built for shock (its tone is far too studious for that) nor that it is absent stories of redemption. Kirk's curated collection contains at least as much redemption as cruel fate. But the sublime awe that an understanding of genes elicits, like all sublime, draws heavily on primal, deific fear and uncertainty in its reader.

My aunt used to say that sooner or later, we'd all have our DNA on our driver's licences, and it seems she's on her way to being proven correct. Kirk anticipates a near future where entire genomes are idly sequenced to look at only a single base pair, less than half a century after the international, decade-long effort to sequence the very first human genome. Each chapter ends with a bombardment of difficult questions: How should society spread its resources for health support? How do you balance the considerations of "quality of life"? What course can the expectant parents hope is best when faced with an impossible decision? These are questions that not even the veteran geneticist is individually qualified to answer.

However, once the work of the gene, the little god of "you", was discovered, the clock was ticking on its impenetrability. The promises genes make, the power they hold, incenses the instincts of the penetrative, Apollonian spirit of the human, not least its will to altruism. It is a topic which Kirk skirts frequently in his book, if one which he remains cautiously agnostic about: that the quest for knowledge confronts us now with further questions; no longer of what we are, but of what we, as individuals and as people, may like to be.