From the Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author ofThe Emperor of All Maladiesโa magnificent history of the gene and a response to the defining question of the future: What becomes of being human when we learn to โreadโ and โwriteโ 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 Mukherjeeโs own familyโwith its tragic and bewildering history of mental illnessโcuts 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 experimentationโfrom 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.
AsThe New Yorkersaid ofThe Emperor of All Maladies, โItโs hard to think of many books for a general audience that have rendered any area of modern science and technology with such intelligence, accessibility, and compassionโฆAn extraordinary achievement.โ 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 โwriteโ the human genome,The Geneis 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.