In 2019, we opened a course titled ‘Genetics and Life Sciences through Media.’
I was wondering, 'How can I explain difficult genetics in an easy way?' and I used movies and news.
After the lecture, students said in their evaluations that it was helpful to listen to the movie together to understand difficult life sciences and genetics.
“Knowing Your Genes Leads to Longevity” is a compilation and supplementation of some of the lecture content.
I hope this book will help readers understand genetics and life science.

I have been studying genetic epidemiology for the past 20 years.
Genetic epidemiology is a field that was born in 1978 to study chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease. It is a convergence of genetics, which studies genes, and epidemiology, which seeks the causes of diseases in the environment and lifestyle.

I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, one of the world's leading institutions in the field of public health, for several years starting in 2005.
It was my first time in an English-speaking country since I started growing hair, so English was a problem.
The thing I thought about for survival was watching movies.
I tried using English subtitles.
Studying abroad in the US has been a great hobby for me, and watching movies is still a good hobby for me.
There's been a lot of news about health and genetics lately.
Just taking care of these things will help you understand health and genetics.

In modern society, it is important to have knowledge about genetics.
When I first wrote this book, my goal was to make the difficult subject of medical genetics a little easier to understand through movies and news articles.
However, in the process of writing the book, several social issues related to genetics were also included.
There is a debate about whether homosexuality is innate or acquired.
This section was covered in part under the title 'Homosexuality and Genes'.
The film "The Ten Commandments" is about Moses and the Ten Commandments from the Bible.
As a health researcher, the Ten Commandments that particularly interest me are: “Honor your parents and you will live a long life.”
This was included under the title, 'Knowing your genes will help you live longer.'
I have been teaching clinical genetics at a university for the past 10 years.
The major change in medical genetics came in 2003 with the completion of the human genome map through the Human Genome Project.
The textbooks mainly used in the lectures were Thompson & Thompson's Genetics (Beommunsa) and IAN D.
This is Young's medical genetics (world science) textbook.
In 2019, we opened a course titled 'Genetics and Life Sciences through Media'.
I was wondering, 'How can I explain difficult genetics in an easy way?' and I used movies and news.
After the lecture, students said in their evaluations that it was helpful to listen to the movie together to understand difficult life sciences and genetics.
This book is a compilation and supplementation of some of the content from these lectures.
I hope this book will help readers understand genetics and life science.

It's a new feeling to be about to publish my first book.
I remembered the difficulties and the effort I put into writing my first thesis.
Those efforts have served as a foundation for me to become the author of dozens of papers.
Whenever I felt like giving up on writing a book, I consoled myself and endured, thinking that it was my first book and that it would be difficult.
There are many people I am grateful to as the book approaches publication.
First of all, I would like to thank Director Lee Chang-yong of Korea Medical Science for his generous support.
I would like to thank my loving wife, my young son and daughter, and my parents, who gave me 50% of my genes and inspired me to write this book, for their encouragement and support, and my parents-in-law who devotedly support me in raising my children as a dual-income couple.

--- From the "Prologue"