The Gene

Once upon a time, we were unaware of DNA. We could tell that taller parents have taller kids, we could select tomato plants for sweeter fruit, and we could even construct plausible relationships between long-extinct animals and their descendants. Still, the nature of the stuff from which these links are made and how it works or fails to work remained a mystery.

Solving this mystery is one of humanity’s most remarkable achievements, and Mukherjee tells the tale with style and humor, weaving in recollections of his family’s encounters with mental illness. Despite my familiarity with the end result, the… show more.

I love to discuss this book with my students; this is a more recent (relative to the others) retelling of the story, with more details fleshed out through decades of scholarship in the area.

The author tells stories about his family and relates this to the discovery of the physical basis of heredity. This book was the inspiration for a Ken Burns series on PBS.

This is a fantastic book about the history of the development of contemporary genetics. The book is easy to read for a wide audience and is not only suitable for experts in the field.

It shows how misconceptions and unethical use of knowledge about inheritance have occurred over the last 100 years, not only in Nazi Germany but also in other countries, including the US. The book also describes how the fear of the unknown has led to the slowing down of developments in molecular genetics. Experiments with genetic modifications of small organisms were often seen as a danger to… show more.

As both a follow-up and a sort of prequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Emperor of All Maladies, oncologist Sid Mukherjee wrote another elegant masterpiece in The Gene.

The book unwinds the rich history of genetics research with both substance and an abundance of style, culminating in the discovery of CRISPR and gene editing. It is as good an introduction to the story of DNA and genetics as can be found, one that sets the stage for a variety of therapeutic interventions. 

Genetic science is so new and so specialized that it almost has its own language, and yet it is changing the way we understand life and death, and bringing a new kind of medicine that will radically alter health and medicine in future generations. Mukherjee is the best of science writers, deploying beautiful metaphors to help readers grasp this complex subject.

Pulitzer Prize winner Siddhartha Mukherjee, a Harvard and Oxford-educated physician, illuminates humanity’s thousand-year relationship with its genes. Mukherjee intersperses struggles within his own family (every family has its genetic skeletons) with stories of the people who discovered how human heredity works: from nineteenth-century pioneers like Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin to Francis Galton and the early twentieth century’s social eugenicists to the founders of Genentech and the stunning advances of the current century. No other book captures the sweep and majesty of the field of genetics, while at the same time illuminating the very human characters who advanced it over… show more.