The Gene: An Intimate History

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Jun 2016 · Random House

About this eBook

** NEW YORK TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER **

The Gene is the story of one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in our history from the author of The Emperor of All Maladies.

The story begins in an Augustinian abbey in 1856, and takes the reader from Darwin’s groundbreaking theory of evolution, to the horrors of Nazi eugenics, to present day and beyond - as we learn to “read” and “write” the human genome that unleashes the potential to change the fates and identities of our children.

Majestic in its scope and ambition, The Gene provides us with a definitive account of the epic history of the quest to decipher the master-code that makes and defines humans – and paints a fascinating vision of both humanity’s past and future.

For fans of Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking and Being Mortal by Atul Gwande.

‘Siddhartha Mukherjee is the perfect person to guide us through the past, present, and future of genome science’ Bill Gates

‘A thrilling and comprehensive account of what seems certain to be the most radical, controversial and, to borrow from the subtitle, intimate science of our time...Read this book and steel yourself for what comes next’ Sunday Times

Ratings and reviews

Historical and personal, detailed and intense but still accessible guide to the long and covoluted history of the discovery of genes, and the risks and rewards of manipulating them. Published 2015, so much has changed since, but very much worth reading.

This book, like his book on cancer, does so well to beautifully combine science, history, and personal stories.

App keeps crashing whenever I try to read this book.

About the author

Siddhartha Mukherjee is a cancer physician and researcher, a stem cell biologist and a cancer geneticist. He is the author of The Laws of Medicine and The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction and the Guardian First Book Award.

Mukherjee is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University. A Rhodes Scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School. His laboratory has identified genes that regulate stem cells, and his team is internationally recognized for its discovery of skeletal stem cells and genetic alterations in blood cancers.

He has published work in Nature, Cell, Neuron, The New England Journal of Medicine, the New York Times and several other magazine and journals. He lives with his family in New York City.