Ebook
English language
Published May 8, 2017 by Scribner.
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).
“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 …
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).
“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.
Source: publisher's description
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.
