The Gene

An Intimate History

By: Siddhartha Mukherjee

Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris

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).

Splendid, but you also need the print.

Any additional comments?

This is a splendid book, superbly read--better than his excellent history of cancer--with only one reservation. That is: it is too compact to be absorbed in audio only. I started off without text and changed my mind about a third of the way in. I absorbed much more once I downloaded the Kindle although it is rich enough---and good enough--that it would easily reward a second read/listen. Highest marks for the audio but also get the Kindle (or paper).

Recommended reading !!!

Grrat review of the history of the discovery of hereditary traits, DNA, genes, the moral implications of the past, present and future. Loved it.

superb

long.. wonderful and beautifully read. little did I know how little I knew.
Allan Pont md

More descriptive than prescriptive

80-90% of the book is a detailed historical review of all the theoretical revelations, experiments and building blocks that have lead us to where we are today; with the ability to alter genes. I wish more time was spent discussing and analyzing the implications of where we are today, providing some normative and practical boundaries of how we might move forward.

fascinating detail and information

well worth the read. Really makes you think and wonder about the future. highly recommended