Behind the scenes of My Sister's Keeper the novel

    Jodi Picoult is quite the renowned author and got her her big break by just being an average college student.  She has written over twenty novels. One of them being My Sister’s Keeper.  She began her writing career studying creative writing at Princeton. She held some different jobs after graduation before she chased her dreams and graduated from Harvard with a degree in education.  Picoult wrote her first book while pregnant with her first child.  Jodi and her husband live in New Hampshire with their three children.  She loves animals, and lives with her four dogs, two donkeys, two geese, and eight chickens. Wow I can’t imagine having to keep up with three kids and 14 pets! Jodi Picoult has truly accomplished a lot.

     Are designer babies ethical? Jodi Picoult thought about this when doing research for a previous book.  She was researching eugenics for the previous book which is the science of improving human characteristics through controlling the breeding of children.  This science has also been known as “designer babies”.  Picoult discovered that a family in America had gotten pregnant with a baby boy that was made to have the same bone marrow cells as his sister who was suffering a rare form of leukemia.  They gave the cord blood cells to his sister who is still in remission seven years later.  Jodi Picoult wondered how the boy would  feel if the sister was never put into remission and whether he would feel responsible.  What if he thought the only reason he was born was because his sister had cancer?  The more Picoult thought about it the more she liked the storyline for a fiction book.  Jodi Picoult went with the idea and published My Sister’s Keeper.