Roxanne Khamsi—Beyond Inheritance: Our Ever-Mutating Cells and a New Understanding of Health

Advance copy: Backstories on books by NASW members

Cover of the book Beyond Inheritance: Our Ever-Mutating Cells and a New Understanding of Health by Roxanne Khamsi, showing a fanciful depiction of chromosome strands in several neon colors, along with the title and author’s name in large white print, and the subtitle in grey print superimposed on a black background.
Beyond Inheritance
BEYOND INHERITANCE: OUR EVER-MUTATING CELLS AND
A NEW UNDERSTANDING OF HEALTH
Roxanne Khamsi
Riverhead Books, April 21, 2026
Hardcover: $30.00, eBook, $15.99, Audio Book, $14.95
Hardcover ISBN-13: 9798217281626
eBook ISBN: 9780593541937
Audio Book ISBN: 9798217281626

Khamsi reports:

Many of us have been taught to see mutation at the individual level through a narrow lens. We are often told only that acquired genetic changes in a person can cause cancer. That’s a profound health consequence, but it’s not the whole story.

Portrait photo of Roxanne Khamsi
Roxanne Khamsi
Photo by Brian Friedman
Around eight years ago, while I was on staff at a research journal, I learned that new studies connected acquired mutations to heart disease. That was wild to me. Heart disease is a very different disease from cancer. From that point on, I noticed more and more scientists talking about how DNA changes occur in people throughout the course of life and the different ways those changes can affect our health. These profound revelations in genetics didn’t seem to be reaching the public. I felt I needed to write a book to convey where the science is really at.

Most people don't understand that they are mutating as they live and breathe. But they are, and I wrote Beyond Inheritance to lift the curtain and show what is truly going on in our bodies. To me, it's time for a massive update to how we think and talk about our genomes. They are definitely not static. They are dynamic and constantly changing within us.

I started writing the book as I was also covering the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s been in process almost four years. During the course of reporting Beyond Inheritance, I gathered more than 1,000 research papers and interviewed around 100 sources: Patients, doctors, laboratory scientists—people whose lives have been touched by genetic mutation and who are trying to understand the phenomenon of non-inherited mutations.

My hope is that my book—and the audiobook version I recorded—will give people a grasp of how our changing DNA affects our risk of everything from autoimmunity to Alzheimer's. I also hope it will help folks appreciate the often-overlooked upside of mutation in healing our tissues and giving us better antibodies to fight disease.

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Advance Copy

The path from idea to book may take myriad routes. The Advance Copy column, started in 2000 by NASW volunteer book editor Lynne Lamberg, features NASW authors telling the stories behind their books. Authors are asked to report how they got their idea, honed it into a proposal, found an agent and a publisher, funded and conducted their research, and organized their writing process. They also are asked to share what they wish they’d known when they started or would do differently next time, and what advice they can offer aspiring authors. Lamberg edits the authors’ answers to produce the Advance Copy reports.

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