The Making of You: A Journey from Cell to Human

“280 days before your birth. A report on what you forgot while being at the center of events” tells the STORY ABOUT YOU—from conception to birth, from the first cell to nine months later, when you decided to appear in this world.

Do you know that in the early 20th century, the expression “THE RABBIT DIED” meant a woman was pregnant? Or that the tiny sea worm “Bonellia viridis” spends its entire life inside its own female, serving as her personal donor of sperm? These are just two of the many very unusual facts you’ll find in the book by Catarina Vestre, which tells us everything about the marvelous process of human development in the mother’s womb.

The author’s task is to go as deeply as possible into a living organism and examine the process of pregnancy at the cellular level, explain how chromosomes work, how cells communicate with each other, and what DNA is. She also addresses the reader as if, at the moment of reading, they are inside their mother’s body and grow month by month—here you are only a combination of two parental cells, here there are four cells, then six, eight… and then the heart starts to beat, hearing develops, vision appears, lungs form, fingers on hands and feet take shape, and so on.