2017 Audie Award Finalist for Non-Fiction
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).
