According to the back flap on his book, Dr. Kazuo Murakami is “one of the top geneticists in the world and Professor Emeritus at the University of Tsukuba, one of Japan’s leading research universities.”

In The Divine Code of Life, he makes his case for the idea that how we think can activate good dormant genes and switch off negative ones. Here are a few factoids that got some high-liter:

• “For any one child, there are seventy trillion possible combinations of genes.”
• “As far as we can tell, only about 5 to 10 percent of our genes are actually working; what the rest are doing remains unknown.”
• “All living things use the same genetic code.”
• “Imagine that you could collect all the DNA from the world’s population of six billion people. It would weigh only as much as a single grain of rice.”
• “The information contained in our genes, if printed in book form, would amount to three thousand volumes each a thousand pages long.”

I can’t say that this was a fun read, but I like the idea that we can have some control over something as… basic? … as our genes. I suspect this is where some of the really big medical breakthroughs will happen. Are happening.