The Gene
An Intimate History
by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Published By: Scribner, 2016
Genre: Nonfiction | Science & Technology
Page Count: 608 (Paperback)
Audiobook Length: 19 hours and 22 minutes
Audiobook Narrator: Dennis Boutsikaris
ISBN: 9781476733524
Publisher’s Description
The #1 NEW YORK TIMES Bestseller
The basis for the PBS Ken Burns Documentary The Gene: An Intimate History
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).
“Sid Mukherjee has the uncanny ability to bring together science, history, and the future in a way that is understandable and riveting, guiding us through both time and the mystery of life itself.” –Ken Burns
“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.
“A fascinating and often sobering history of how humans came to understand the roles of genes in making us who we are—and what our manipulation of those genes might mean for our future” (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel), The Gene is the revelatory and magisterial history of a scientific idea coming to life, the most crucial science of our time, intimately explained by a master. “The Gene is a book we all should read” (USA TODAY).
About the Author
Siddhartha Mukherjee, born on July 21, 1970, in New Delhi, is a distinguished Indian-American physician, scientist, and author. A graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Medical School, he specializes in oncology and has made significant contributions to cancer research. In 2010, Mukherjee received the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for his groundbreaking book “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.” Beyond his medical practice, he is known for his ability to communicate complex scientific concepts to a broader audience, contributing to a better understanding of medicine and health.
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