In the following interview excerpt, Picoult talks about how she became interested in the topic genetic planning and how she performed her research for her novel.

BRC: What made you choose to write a book with a plot that concerns genetic planning, namely with one child being conceived as a possible donor for another?

JP: I stumbled over this idea by accident while I was researching my last novel, Second Glance. That book involved the VT eugenics project—namely, how Vermont was one of twenty-six states in the US in the 1920s and 1930s that had a law on the books to sterilize people they felt were degenerate. When Hitler praised these laws during WWII, funding dried up—as did the American Eugenics Society. The organization that moved into its corporate headquarters, believe it or not, is the Human Genome Project. In many ways, this incredibly advanced...