a book

The Gene: An Intimate History

Name: The Gene: An Intimate History
Rating: 5 (13 reviews)
Author: Siddhartha Mukherjee
ISBN: 9781476733500

Siddhartha Mukherjee · 2016 · 592 pages

The #1 NEW YORK TIMES Bestseller
The basis for the PBS Ken Burns Documentary The Gene: An Intimate History

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies—a fascinating history of the gene and “a magisterial account of how human minds have laboriously, ingeniously picked apart what makes us tick” (Elle).

"Sid Mukherjee has the uncanny ability to bring together science, history, and the future in a way that is understandable and riveting, guiding us through both time and the mystery of life itself." –Ken Burns

“Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee dazzled readers with his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies in 2010. That achievement was evidently just a warm-up for his virtuoso performance in The Gene: An Intimate History, in which he braids science, history, and memoir into an epic with all the range and biblical thunder of Paradise Lost” (The New York Times). In this biography Mukherjee brings to life the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices.

“Mukherjee expresses abstract intellectual ideas through emotional stories…[and] swaddles his medical rigor with rhapsodic tenderness, surprising vulnerability, and occasional flashes of pure poetry” (The Washington Post). Throughout, the story of Mukherjee’s own family—with its tragic and bewildering history of mental illness—reminds us of the questions that hang over our ability to translate the science of genetics from the laboratory to the real world. In riveting and dramatic prose, he describes the centuries of research and experimentation—from Aristotle and Pythagoras to Mendel and Darwin, from Boveri and Morgan to Crick, Watson and Franklin, all the way through the revolutionary twenty-first century innovators who mapped the human genome.

“A fascinating and often sobering history of how humans came to understand the roles of genes in making us who we are—and what our manipulation of those genes might mean for our future” (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel), The Gene is the revelatory and magisterial history of a scientific idea coming to life, the most crucial science of our time, intimately explained by a master. “The Gene is a book we all should read” (USA TODAY).

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recommended by 13 people

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Andrej Karpathy
“This book offers a comprehensive and engaging overview of genetics. It includes the history of the field, anecdotes of its development, a well-paced technical explanation of the high level aspects, and quite a lot of discussion on the associated moral dilemmas that we are faced with as we understand how we can use this technology to change our own species. Unfortunately, the book does not delve into some of the aspects of modern genetics that I find most interesting, such as gene drive. These are discussed near the very end almost as an afterthought, and are hardly given enough focus. Similarly, epigenetics is only briefly touched on. Lastly, the book is very human-centric and does not discover genetics in a broader context of evolution in animals (e.g. selfish genes), which I find fascinating. Overall, this will likely become my default recommendation for the reference Genetics book for a general interested reader who is mostly interested in the history of genetics, who enjoys thinking about the ethics of genetics in humans, and who wants to get a good high-level overview of the technical aspects. 4/5”
Bill Gates
“More recently, I’ve gained a lot from reading a diverse set of books and authors including Under a White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert, On Immunity by Eula Biss, The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Eradication by Nancy Stepan.”↗
Peter Attia
“Your next read--"The Gene" by Sid Mukherjee. Another masterpiece along the lines of "Emperor of all Maladies" Great nuance and history.”↗
Bryan Johnson
“A great book.”↗
Packy Mccormick
“"I'm reading The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee, and it's incredible. It's in a category for me that's something like "Kids Should Have to Read This Before Studying X for Overview & Sense of Wonder" - The Gene for Bio - Carlo Rovelli for Physics What else is in this category?"”↗
Arianna Simpson
“I read 51 books in 2017 (may squeeze in one or two more before EOY). Here are my favorites, with a little bit of commentary. In no particular order:”↗
John Legend
“Currently reading The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee. So interesting and well written.”↗
Reid Hoffman
Adam Rutherford
Hugh Jackman
Amit Paranjape
Daniel Petre
James Cameron