Leroi writes about the body with Pateresque delicacy; he is an aesthete for whom understanding enhances mystery; an artist who gazes with wonder at the dance of the genes as the foetus forms itself.

Sunday Telegraph, London

In the 16th and 17th centuries, according to Armand Leroi's wonderful study of genetic mutation, "monsters were everywhere". They were collected by kings, catalogued by scientists, used by theologians as evidence of the wrath of God. Even though our current reigning monarch surrounds herself with corgis rather than court dwarves, and conjoined twins are no longer sent on European tours, our fascination with the forms and varieties of the human body has continued into the 21st century.

Teratology, or the science of monstrous birth, is no longer a respected discipline, but we have our own preoccupation with physical error which is expressed in an obsession with bodily perfection: with ironed-out or botox-injected skin, thighs from which the fat has been sucked, pumped-up breasts.

Beauty, Leroi writes in the final pages of Mutants, is defined by what it is not rather than what it appears to be. We delight in perfection because of "the imperfections which are absent: the machine errors that arise from the vicissitudes of hte womb, childhood, maturity and old age, that are written all over our bodies."

It might seem surprising that Leroi concludes his discussions of hermaphrodite, albinos, dwarves, those with one eye, three nipples, or faces which are so hirsute that hair tumbles out in long flowing locks, with these observations on beauty. But beauty, rather than the grotesque, is the real subject of his book.

Leroi writes about the body with Pateresque delicacy; he is an aesthete for whom understanding enhances mystery; an artist who gazes with wonder at the dance of the genes as the foetus forms itself. We are all contestants in what he calls the "game of chance" ­ a game which we all, to a certain extent, lose (propensity to fatness, baldness, and short sight are each the effect of a genetic mutation).

An academic scientist, Leroi writes like a humanist and weaves into his accounts of the workings of DNA, references to Plato's Symposium, Greek mythology and European history. His erudition is accompanied by the modesty of knowing how little he in fact knows and how indebted he is to the giants of the past.

He sees his book merely as "an interim report" on the project undertaken by Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor to James I and the man who realised the true use of deformity to science. "Bacon recognised," Leroi writes, "that the pursuit of the causes of error is not an end in itself, but rather just a means. The monstrous, the strange and the deviant, or merely the different, he is saying, reveal the laws of nature." *...Leroi's book is a paen to the human body...a celebration of humanity.

*[a review of anther book is intercalated here]

Frances Wilson
Sunday Telegraph, London (May 16 2004)