From the Pulitzer Prize-winning, best-selling author of The Emperor of All Maladies, a magnificent history of the gene and a response to the defining question of the future: What becomes of being human when we learn to “read” and “write” our own genetic information?
The extraordinary Siddhartha Mukherjee has written a biography of the gene as deft, brilliant, and illuminating as his extraordinarily successful biography of cancer. Weaving science, social history, and personal narrative to tell us the story of one of the most important conceptual breakthroughs of modern times, Mukherjee animates the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices.
Throughout the narrative, the story of Mukherjee’s own family – with its tragic and bewildering history of mental illness – cuts like a bright red line, reminding us of the many questions that hang over our ability to translate the science of genetics from the laboratory to the real world. In superb prose and with an instinct for the dramatic scene, he describes the centuries of research and experimentation – from Aristotle and Pythagoras to Mendel and Darwin, from Boveri and Thomas Morgan to Crick, Watson, and Rosa Franklin, all the way through the revolutionary 21st-century innovators who mapped the human genome.
As The New Yorker said of The Emperor of All Maladies, “It’s hard to think of many books for a general audience that have rendered any area of modern science and technology with such intelligence, accessibility, and compassion…. An extraordinary achievement.”
A riveting, revelatory, and magisterial history of a scientific idea coming to life and an essential preparation for the moral complexity introduced by our ability to create or “write” the human genome, The Gene is a must-listen for everyone concerned about the definition and future of humanity. This is the most crucial science of our time, intimately explained by a master.
The Gene (And thensome This book is a valuable resource for the study and history of the gene and tells us about the researchers and their tenacious pursuit in readable language. As a parent who has a child with a chromosomal abnormality I strongly recommend Dr. Mukherhee’s exhaustive narrative. It provides tremendous background and a hope that perhaps chromosomes will be manipulable.I was provided with an electronic copy in return for an honest review
Fabulous introduction to genetics I loved this book. Unlike most science books, this one tells a story. Author Siddhartha Mukherjee weaves a tale about the gene and genetics suitable for readers with or without a science background. So even when I was reading sections that I had learned about in school, it was still hard to put the book down. Mukherjee uses a lot of specific, concrete examples to illustrate his points, even using some of his family’s history. Mukherjee’s writing is very clever and there is some…
“We used to think our future was in the stars. Now we know it’s in our genes.” Genetics is humanity and life writ large, and this book on the gene by physician and writer Siddhartha Mukherjee paints on a canvas as large as life itself. It deals with both the history of genetics and its applications in health and disease. It shows us that studying the gene not only holds the potential to transform the treatment of human disease and to feed the world’s burgeoning population, but promises to provide a window into life’s deepest secrets and into our very identity…