The Gene (Mukherjee)

The Gene: An Intimate History
Siddhartha Mukherjee, 2016
Scribner
608 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781476733500


Summary
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling 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?

Siddhartha Mukherjee has a 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 Morgan to Crick, Watson and Franklin, all the way through the revolutionary twenty-first century innovators who mapped the human genome.

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-read for everyone concerned about the definition and future of humanity. This is the most crucial science of our time, intimately explained by a master. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1970
• Where—New Dehli, India
• Education—B.A., Stanford; Ph. D, Oxford; M.D., Harvard
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize
• Currently—teaches at Columbia Medical School in  New York City, New York
 

Siddhartha Mukherjee (born 1970) is an Indian-born American doctor and non-fiction writer. He is the author of the Pulitizer Prize winner The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (2010). In 2016 he published The Gene: An Intimate History.

Mukherjee was born in New Delhi, India. He went to school at St. Columba's School. He majored in biology at Stanford University, then won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University where he earned a Ph.D. in immunology. After graduation, he attended Harvard Medical School to train as an internist and won an oncology fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital.

He is currently serving as Assistant Professor of Medicine at Columbia University in New York City. He is also a staff cancer physician at Columbia University Medical Center.[3] He lives in New York and is married to the MacArthur award-winning artist Sarah Sze. They have two daughters.

HIs 2010 higly-regarded book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, details the evolution of diagnosis and treatment of human cancers from ancient Egypt to the latest developments in chemotherapy and targeted therapy. In addition to winning the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, it was listed in "The 10 Best Books of 2010" by the  and the "Top 10 Nonfiction Books by Time magazine. In 2016 Mukherjee published The Gene: An Intimate History, which quickly reached the top of the New York Times Bestseller list. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
The story of [the gene]…has been told, piecemeal, in different ways, but never before with the scope and grandeur that Siddhartha Mukherjee brings to his new history, The Gene. He fully justifies the claim that it is "one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in the history of science." As he did in his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies (2010), Mukherjee views his subject panoptically, from a great and clarifying height, yet also intimately…The books form a magnificent pair. The Emperor of All Maladies is, as Mukherjee notes, the story of the genetic code corrupted, tipping into malignancy. The new book, then, serves as its prequel.... Mukherjee arranges his history not just chronologically but thematically. This is necessary. Science seldom progresses in a neat logical order anyway, but genetics, especially, encompasses and influences many subjects at once…Mukherjee's analysis…is clarifying and, in my view, definitive.
James Gleick - New York Times Book Review


[D]estined to soar into the firmament of the year's must reads, to win accolades and well-deserved prizes, and to set a new standard for lyrical science writing…Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee dazzled readers with his Pulitzer-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…Thanks to Dr. Mukherjee's remarkably clear and compelling prose, the reader has a fighting chance of arriving at the story of today's genetic manipulations with an actual understanding of the immensely complicated science and the even more complicated moral questions.
Abigail Zuger M.D. - New York Times


Many of the same qualities that made The Emperor of All Maladies so pleasurable are in full bloom in The Gene. The book is compassionate, tautly synthesized, packed with unfamiliar details about familiar people.
Jennifer Senior - New York Times


[Mukherjee] nourishes his dry topics into engaging reading, expresses abstract intellectual ideas through emotional stories....[and] swaddles his medical rigor with rhapsodic tenderness, surprising vulnerability, and occasional flashes of pure poetry.... With a marriage of architectural precision and luscious narrative, an eye for both the paradoxical detail and the unsettling irony, and a genius for locating the emotional truths buried in chemical abstractions, Mukherjee leaves you feeling as though you've just aced a college course for which you'd been afraid to registe—and enjoyed every minute of it.
Andrew Solomon - Washington Post


His topic is compelling. . . . And it couldn’t have come at a better time.
Courtney Humphries - Boston Globe


Mukherjee is an assured, polished wordsmith . . . who displays a penchant for the odd adroit aphorism and well-placed pun. . . . A well-written, accessible, and entertaining account of one of the most important of all scientific revolutions, one that is destined to have a fundamental impact on the lives of generations to come. The Gene is an important guide to that future.
Robin McKie - Guardian (UK)


[The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene] both beautifully navigate a sea of complicated medical information in a way that is digestible, poignant, and engaging.... [The Gene] is a book we all should read. I shook my head countless times while devouring it, wondering how the author—a brilliant physician, scientist, writer, and Rhodes Scholar—could possibly possess so many unique talents. When I closed the book for the final time, I had the answer: Must be in the genes.
Matt McCarthy - USA Today


[A]uthoritative...building on extensive research and erudition, and examining the Gordian knots of genes through the prism of his own family’s struggle with a disease. He renders complex science with a novelist’s skill for conjuring real lives, seismic events.
Hamilton Cain - Minneapolis Star Tribune


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.... The Gene captures the scientific method—questioning, researching, hypothesizing, experimenting, analyzing—in all its messy, fumbling glory, corkscrewing its way to deeper understanding and new questions.
Jim Higgins - Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel


The Gene is excellent preparation for all the quandaries to come.
Mary Ann Gwinn - Seattle Times


Inspiring and tremendously evocative reading....both expansive and accessible.... Mukherjee spends most of his time looking into the past, and what he finds is consistently intriguing. But his sober warning about the future might be the book’s most important contribution.
Kevin Canfield - San Francisco Chronicle


As compelling and revealing as [The Emperor of All Maladies].... On one level, The Gene is a comprehensive compendium of well-told stories with a human touch. But at a deeper level, the book is far more than a simple science history.
Fred Bortz - Dalls Morning News


Dr Mukherjee uses personal experience to particularly good effect.... Perhaps the most powerful lesson of Dr Mukherjee’s book [is]: genetics is starting to reveal how much the human race has to gain from tinkering with its genome, but still has precious little to say about how much we might lose.
Economist (UK)


(Starred review.) Mukherjee deftly relates the basic scientific facts...while making clear the aspects of genetics that remain unknown. He offers insight into both the scientific process and the sociology of science.... Mukherjee grounds the abstract in the personal to add power and poignancy to his excellent narrative.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) The development of the concept of the gene as the primary unit of heredity is comparable in terms of impact and importance to that of the atom and the byte to physics and information science, respectively, argues Mukherjee.... This highly accessible and thoughtful volume on a cornerstone of modern biology will have broad appeal.— Evan M. Anderson, Kirkendall P.L., Ankeny, IA
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Sobering, humbling, and extraordinarily rich reading from a wise and gifted writer who sees how far we have come—but how much farther far we have to go to understand our human nature and destiny.
Kirkus Reviews

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