Today I officially launched my first book. It’s an easy read about a scary subject; i.e., why (and how) we should rethink the risks of genetic engineering and other emerging biotechnologies. Easy for you, that is. For me, it was three years and nine months in the making, if you don’t count the year of research and paper-writing before I decided to make it a book. But who’s counting.

(If you’re interested, here’s the press release. Also, more background on me and why I wrote the book.)

Many of my friends have had a good laugh about the title, considering they thought they were going to have to do an intervention to get me through the process.

Despite how long it took, and all the agita that went along with it, I love this book, and I hope it makes a contribution to a much-needed conversation about how to assess the risks of innovations like genetic engineering, nanotech and whatever other radically new technologies are presently careening through the pipeline toward the market.

Also, I ended up publishing the book myself, through Lulu.com. Overall, this was a remarkably easy process (with the exception of pesky Macintosh-font-PDF issues). I will write more about this, but for now let me say that I believe companies like Lulu, that provide such a useful, hands-on service for authors, are going to revolutionize academic publishing. It’s about time.