What if you aged one year to everyone's four-and when you turned twenty-five your lifespan reached one hundred? Katherine (Kit) Mckinley was born on the 29th day of February with the "leap year gene" and it was the responsibility of her relatives to make sure that her special genome was hidden from the rest of the world. Of course, that meant that they had to lie, create false documents, and spend their lives on the run so that no one would notice Kit's bizarre youthfulness. When the notion of feminine eugenics became popular, Kit became even more compromised, especially as it spread to a budding Nazi Germany. Her mother was a brilliant scientist who spent the rest of her long life in labs researching the origin of this gene and hoping to find a cure for her daughter's dilemma. At her funeral, distinguished scientists spoke about her research which inspired them to plot the human genome-and develop the CRISPR - a way of removing and replacing DNA.
Besides being an interesting story, the book gets into questions of who gets to live and who must die. Are humans who are not "perfect" allowed to exist or must their lives be extinguished for the good of society? Should imperfections be removed or changed before birth? Is it acceptable to monetize genetic discoveries? A very thought-provoking novel of the good and evil that science may cause.
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