Genetics!

by Amy Bernstein


I wanted to make the genetics in my book at least realistic to be a bit believable, so I met with a Biology Professor who works with my husband Adam. Sebastian was kind enough to sit down with me for two hours and discuss what could and what couldn’t happen and how it all works. I don’t think I have taken biology since high school, and they know a lot more about genetics now.

“Natural Selection throws everything against the wall to see what sticks. When there are errors, caused by mutation, the healthy parent’s genes see that they do not gain sway. But when they exist on both sides, or there is in-breeding these problems become more common. As in the case with the British Royal Family.  Ashkenazi Jews are a limited mating group, though not as much so as the royal family.” So, diseases like Crohn’s disease and Bipolar illness, which are prevalent in my family, can become more common.

“Natural selection- greed, or paranoia may be atavistic. They were selected by nature for an environment that existed in the past then, it changed and these traits become mental illnesses.”

“Conspiracy theories today may be linked to early knowledge that the next tribe over tried to poison your dinner.  Characteristics that were adaptive in the past are now detrimental. “

Fascinating


Time traveler stuck in time

by Amy Bernstein


This is for the long fiction piece I am writing. She must have a past, a childhood, the whole magilla. So now I go back and make up her past and she becomes someone I know, maybe someone I have mentioned in a short story but now I can fill her out, and set her in a different time and place.

I am very nervous about how my family will feel about this book. Maybe they will, as they have in the past, see themselves in it and take umbrage to my depiction. I have never portrayed my brother in anything I have written, but he sees himself often anyway and then he becomes so irate with me!


Maya HealingI

by Amy Bernstein


I have been doing extensive research on the healing tradition of the Maya for my book. Though I would call myself a just about totally non-spiritual person, and an intense atheist, still I find the role of the gods in healing a compelling story. Western medicine, when it looks at traditional medicine at all tends to want to go straight to the use of traditional medicines, separating that from the other parts of treatment which are spiritual as well as physical.

In the ending of the novel I am writing, Maya medicine in all of its parts becomes a central part. There is also the power of story in medicine.

https://nadiacolburn.com/lewis-mehl-madrona-and-the-power-of-narrative-for-healing/?ck_subscriber_id=1104637142