Hardcover, 592 pages
English language
Published May 8, 2016 by Scribner.
The story of the gene begins in an obscure Augustinian abbey in Moravia in 1856 where a monk stumbles on the idea of a ‘unit of heredity’. It intersects with Darwin’s theory of evolution, and collides with the horrors of Nazi eugenics in the 1940s. The gene transforms post-war biology. It reorganizes our understanding of sexuality, temperament, choice and free will. This is a story driven by human ingenuity and obsessive minds – from Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel to Francis Crick, James Watson and Rosalind Franklin, and the thousands of scientists still working to understand the code of codes.
This is an epic, moving history of a scientific idea coming to life, by the author of The Emperor of All Maladies. But woven through The Gene, like a red line, is also an intimate history – the story of Mukherjee’s own family and its recurring pattern of mental illness, …
The story of the gene begins in an obscure Augustinian abbey in Moravia in 1856 where a monk stumbles on the idea of a ‘unit of heredity’. It intersects with Darwin’s theory of evolution, and collides with the horrors of Nazi eugenics in the 1940s. The gene transforms post-war biology. It reorganizes our understanding of sexuality, temperament, choice and free will. This is a story driven by human ingenuity and obsessive minds – from Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel to Francis Crick, James Watson and Rosalind Franklin, and the thousands of scientists still working to understand the code of codes.
This is an epic, moving history of a scientific idea coming to life, by the author of The Emperor of All Maladies. But woven through The Gene, like a red line, is also an intimate history – the story of Mukherjee’s own family and its recurring pattern of mental illness, reminding us that genetics is vitally relevant to everyday lives. These concerns reverberate even more urgently today as we learn to “read” and “write” the human genome – unleashing the potential to change the fates and identities of our children.
--front flap
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.
