The Gene

I loved Emperoro of all Maladies and while The Gene was pretty genious, too, it lacked a bit of humanity I guess. While Emperor told various stories of people afflicted with cancer and left me with a feeling of cautious optimism, The Gene was much more focused on the science side of, well, science. This made me struggle at times to keep reading and understanding what I just read.

Still it's a very interesting book and well worth reading. Just bring a little more time and a lot of coffee or tea. And maybe put your phone down far away, because I kept googling stuff which kept leading me away from the initial bit of information I was looking up.

Brilliant! It's style of slowly teaching you about genetics as it guides you through the history of the discoveries of genetics helps understand the gene better.

There are so many characters along the way, each one toiling for years on some tiny area of expertise they couldn't even be sure was a good idea or worth collecting data on. Like Thomas Morgan, meticulously cross breeding fruit flies and recording results for five years just to see if he can learn anything. If that doesn't inspire you, I don't know what will.

And also, find someone who talks about you the way Siddhartha Mukherjee writes about the DNA double helix.