Trade Paperback, 594 pages
English language
Published May 8, 2017 by Scribner.
Brilliantly interweaving science, social history, and the story of his own family, Pulitzer Prize winner Siddhartha Mukherjee explains the science of genetics and confronts the extra- ordinary influence of heredity on our lives. With superb prose and 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, and all the way through the revolutionary twenty-first-century innovators who are mapping the human genome. The Gene is also, crucially, a preparation for the moral complexity intro- duced by our ability to create or "write" a genome, and thus determine human fate. Riveting, majestic, revelatory, it is a must-read for everyone concerned about the definition and future of humanity. --back cover
Learned a lot listening to this. Great primer for someone who hasn't learned much about genetics before.
I’ve never understood biology at the subcellular level and had hoped to remedy that. No luck. I did learn much from this book, just not what I had hoped: I still feel hopelessly lost around DNA. But that’s OK, maybe my brain just doesn’t work that way.
Good pop-sci writing by a knowledgeable scientist, covers a lot of historical ground while giving a fair sense of the process of discovery and debate, with recurring space for the eugenics ethical pitfalls in each era, and then turns to what and how we can attribute aspects of humanity (race, gender, sexuality) to genetics, with useful caveats.
This book is mostly historical recreations of the circumstances and personalities surrounding some of biology's greatest discoveries over the past 150 years. Its aimed at the general reader. So it serves as a gentle reminder to introductory biology classes although it did dive deeper into a few scientist's personal lives. Not bad, but doesn't live up to the hype.
The history of the gene and the genomic science intertwined with that of the author's own family history of mental illness. 'The Gene' is not just another popular science book. It is a comprehensive, engaging and insightful history of the gene and an analysis of the ethical dilemmas, the challenges and the medical benefits of the genomic science in the 21st century.
