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).

Excellent Text Brought to Life

Dennis Boutsikaris breathes life into Siddhartha Mukherjee's narrative on the history of the gene or genetics, as it were. I've only made it through part one, as it was just released this morning.

The information is not particularly new, but it is packaged quite well. Dr. Mukherjee starts with some personal anecdotes regarding mental illness before delving into the history commenced in ancient Egypt and through Darwin.

I expect the remainder to be as interesting.

From Darwin to Now, a New Understanding

Siddhartha Mukherjee dove deep into the history of the gene and provided and extremely thorough account of the various associated discovery that have occurred since Darwin's day. This book is heavy on the history, and semi light on the science. Each discovery is detailed, but the science involved is related in a manner that is accessible to the nonscientists.

One thing I found curious was his discussion of Lamarck. Recently I finished reading Survival of the Sickest, but Sharon Moalem, in which it was suggested that Lamarck was more of a science writer than a theorist. Moalem posited that it was not Lamarck who came up with the idea that traits acquired during the lifetime were passed down. Rather, Lamarck simply championed that idea, which was the dominant paradigm of the time, in his writing. Mukherjee, like every author I have read except Moalem, took it as a given that Lamarck was the originator of such thought. I now feel compelled to research this and find out who is correct.

In this rich history, Mukherjee shared many interesting tidbits that I hadn't heard or had forgotten about. His choice of facts, both of a personal and scientific nature, kept the book humming along. Despite being a longer than usual science book, it felt as if moved fairly fast.

Some of, what I thought, the more interesting parts of the books were as follows:

The best biography of a scientists involved Herman Muller. When Muller first began his career, he was extremely enamored with eugenics. John Morgan was a prominent expert in eugenics and Muller sought him out to work in his lab. Muller worked on many aspects of genetics and, as a result of his significant contributions , became a Nobel laureate. As he continued his work, Muller realized that instead of being the helpful tool he believed eugenics to be (he thought that would create equality and optimal health for all), it was a tool of oppression, mainly aimed at minorities and poor.

Not wanting to be on the wrong side of history, Muller became very politically active. As editor of a progressive leftist journal called The Spark, he helped champion ideas that promoted equality for women, minorities, and the poor. Instead of being thanked for his efforts, Muller's outspoken views on equality made him a target of the FBI. He underwent a character assassination that attacked him socially, professionally, and politically. Not being able to endure it any longer, he walked out into the woods, took a bottle of pills and fell asleep under a tree. Turned out the pills were not enough to kill him. Grad students found him walking around in a daze.


His best analogy of genes involved a rare syndrome. According to Mukherjee, having a disorder that enables your brain to remember every single thing you have ever experienced might seem like a superpower, but it's more like a crippling disease. He likens it to being in a loud crowd, every moment of your life, and never being able to turn the sound down low enough so you can hear the people you love and want to talk to. It's just noise all the time.

He suggested that genes act like memory. If epigenetic modification does not silence some genes and express others, the end product could never be a fully functioning organism. We are all born with many genes. But if we expressed them all, all of the time, we would not be human. We would not be anything we recognize.

Epigenetic modification is happening all of the time and cannot be separated from gene expression. Sometimes epigenetic modification can turn off and on genes many times in a second. Sometimes it can silence a gene for an entire lifetime, making it as if the gene never existed at all.

There was a wonderful discussion on genes, sex, and gender identity that was top notch. Mukherjee related how sex is determined by the X or Y chromosome *AND* the SRY gene. Not only do the SRY gene and the Y chromosome need to interact, but the SRY gene itself (which in turn regulated the Y chromosome) is itself regulated other genes. This creates a very complex model of gene expression. It's not simple. We cannot just say, "This person is male," or "That person is female." There is more to it.

Genetically, A person can be genetically male, possessing a Y chromosome, but the Y chromosome is not regulated and the person never becomes what we would recognize as male. Thus, a person with a Y chromosome might feel, act, and look like a female. A person might look like a male but their brain, lacking SRY gene regulation of the Y chromosome, might in a real biological sense identify as female. I would like to have seen a discussion of how gender roles have affected gender identity. That cannot really be found in this book, which was disappointing. However, that was the only exception to a truly fantastic discussion of gender identity.

Mukherjee provided an equally wonderful discussion about race, IQ, and genes. It was balanced, well researched, and well presented.


I would have liked more examples of epigenetic modification. There probably wasn't time, considering how long the book was, but there are so many wonderful studies and I never get tired of reading about them. He included the usual suspects and that got the point across to the reader in an effective manner. I would say the overall tone of this book was fairly conservative -- paying homage to Dawkins, paying head to concerns about playing God, expressing concern for those who use evidence from epigenetics to shift paradigms too wildly, etc. Even with that, it was a solid piece of work.

The sequel to the Emperor of All Maladies

I enjoyed the narrative style, being the same as The Emperor, and the narrator, also being the same. It was a little too similar to a genetics lecture at certain points in the center, but if you relax and let it unfold, you will be well rewarded at the end. I recommend this audiobook via audible.

Consider What Kind of Audience You Are

As a book alone 'The Gene' is absolutely superb. Well put together with a superb narrative, excellent voice and succeeds in making an extremely complicated topic accessible.

I hesitate to recommend this as an Audible book however. I consider myself a reasonably intelligent person (said everyone on the internet) but as someone with no real bioscience background (B+ in honors 10th grade biology!) this book became increasingly difficult to follow as the science became more complicated and referential. I don't think I'm alone in that understanding complex biomechanisms doesn't happen immediately so having the narrator gloss quickly from cell reproduction to DNA splitting to ... etc. can become a bit overwhelming.

Overall I enjoyed my experience listening to this but I'd recommend the book format to all but those with science background or perhaps those that listen to audible books with great focus.

Amazing Book for a none biology student

I really enjoyed listening to this book and it is really easy to understand for me. It covered a lot of social and history aspects and also individual stories related to the discovery of gene and its progress since then. Highly recommended.