Stephen Heywood was twenty-nine years old when he learned that he was dying of ALS -- Lou Gehrig's disease. Almost overnight his older brother, Jamie, turned himself into a genetic engineer in a quixotic race to cure the incurable. His Brother's Keeper is a powerful account of their story, as they travel together to the edge of medicine.The book brings home for all of us the hopes and fears of the new biology. In this dramatic and suspenseful narrative, Jonathan Weiner gives us a remarkable portrait of science and medicine today. We learn about gene therapy, stem cells, brain vaccines, and other novel treatments for such nerve-death diseases as ALS, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's -- diseases that afflict millions, and touch the lives of many more."The Heywoods' story taught me many things about the nature of healing in the new millennium," Weiner writes. "They also taught me about what has not changed since the time of the ancients and may never change as long as there are human beings -- about what Lucretius calls 'the ever-living wound of love.'" This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Jonathan Weiner was writer-in-residence at Rockefeller University.

His Brother's Keeper
One Family's Journey to the Edge of Medicine

Chapter One

Portents

When they were boys, Jamie and Stephen Heywood lovedto arm wrestle. They made it a ritual: first the right arm,then the left, then, if there was time, a wrestling match onthe rug. Their rules of engagement were so complicated and so long unspoken that no one else ever learned the game. Even Jamie's best friend Duncan Moss did not know how to play. Duncan would take one step across the line on the rug. Then he would see the look on Jamie's face.

What? What did I do?

He did not know the rules.

The Heywoods lived in an old house on Mill Street in Newtonville,Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. All three of the Heywoodboys, Jamie, then Stephen, and then the youngest, Ben, were athleticdreamers, inventors of many rituals and adventures. The house onMill Street is a block from a patch of woods and a pond. The brothersplayed football there in a corner field that belonged to a neighbor theycalled Aunt Betsy. Late at night when it rained hard, Jamie andStephen snuck out with boogie boards. They hopped a fence to thecreek, which got roaring in a good storm. Through the dark and therain they rode the rapids into Bolough's Pond.

Their parents, Peggy and John Heywood, are well known in Newtonville. They love traditions, too. Each of them has served termsas Senior Warden of Grace Church, in Newton Corners. When theirboys were young, they went back every summer to the dairy farm inSouth Dakota where Peggy had grown up. She had won a full scholarshipto Radcliffe, in Cambridge, which is where she met John. Peggyworked as a therapist; she kept her practice small and devoted herselfto the family.

Every seven years, they spent a year in England, where John wasborn and raised. John Heywood is a professor of mechanical engineeringat the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an internationalauthority on internal combustion engines. He is the son of a British coalengineer who turned to solar power early on, back when only thecranks were interested in what he had to say -- back when a maverick who worried about coal smoke, soot, and acid, and praised the powerof the sun, was like a bolt from the future. John Heywood consultsabout energy efficiency for Ford in Detroit, Ferrari in Italy, Toyota inJapan. When he is at home, he runs MIT's Sloan Automotive Laboratory,to which he commutes from Mill Street on a bicycle.

Each summer in July or August, Peggy's side of the family gatheredfrom across the country for a reunion at the beach town of Duck,near Kitty Hawk, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. A few of thechildren on the beach were always honorary Heywoods, as Aunt Betsywas an honorary aunt. John and Peggy, Jamie, Stephen, and Ben eachbrought friends. The boys swam, sailed, surfed, and raced on the coldshining track the waves made for them. Every summer on one of theirlast days at Duck they played a game of basketball with their cousinsand with strangers they roped in from up and down the beach,wickedly violent games that routinely sent a few Heywoods to thehospital.

As Jamie and Stephen got older, they kept arm wrestling, ritually.In their late teens and early twenties, when the two and a half yearsbetween them no longer mattered, they were perfectly matched. ButJamie became a mechanical engineer, like their father and his father inEngland. Jamie was intelligent and driven, and spent his days and nights working at a desk. Stephen became a carpenter, a hands-onman like their mother's father and brother in South Dakota. Stephenwas intelligent, too, but he mistrusted desks and ambitions. He spenta few years swinging a hammer on a framing crew, and his right armbecame unbeatable.

Late in July of 1997, when Jamie was thirty and Stephen was twenty-eight,they arm wrestled in the beach house their parents had rented thatsummer at Duck. Jamie was five feet, eleven and three-quarter inchestall, and he weighed one hundred and sixty-five pounds; Stephen wassix-foot-three, two-twenty. Jamie was keeping himself in shape, butStephen was building his first house that year, and his right bicep and tricepwere very well-defined. In arm wrestling, there is always a momentwhen the winner knows he has won and the loser knows he has lost. Thebrothers were both surprised when they realized that for the first time infive years, Jamie would force Stephen's right arm down to the table.

Jamie whooped. I beat my carpenter brother. I'm the man! I'mthe man!

Stephen won the next bout, which they fought, as always, lefthanded.That shut up Jamie.

Neither of them suspected that anything was wrong.

That year a team of scientists and veterinarians in Scotlandannounced the birth of a strange lamb, the identical twin of itsmother. The news hung above the year like a comet. All around theworld, the arrival of the lamb was received as a portent, like an earthquake,a fire, an eruption, a millennial battle won or lost. Somethingwas out of whack in the order of the world and would have to be putright, if it could ever be put right -- or else turned to advantage,transformed into acts of healing as novel as the conception of thatcloned lamb.

That was also the year the world's front pages carried the story ofthe death of Jeanne Louise Calment, from Arles, France. She helped inspire people to hope that in the new millennium, human beings might live as long as Methuselah. Jeanne Louise Calment was 122years old. She remembered Vincent van Gogh.

Those who loved science and those who mistrusted it felt an almostsupernatural touch of hope or dread that year, as if all our human ritualswere about to change forever ...

His Brother's Keeper
One Family's Journey to the Edge of Medicine. Copyright © by Jonathan Weiner. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from His Brother's Keeper: One Family's Journey to the Edge of Medicine by Jonathan Weiner
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