The Gene

Spanning the globe and several centuries, this is the story of the quest to decipher the master-code that makes and defines humans, that governs our form and function. It is also an intimate history of the author's own family and its recurring pattern of mental illness, reminding us that genetics is vitally relevant to everyday lives.

With a marriage of architectural precision and luscious narrative , an eye for both the paradoxical detail and the unsettling irony, and a genius for locating the emotional truths buried in chemical abstractions, Mukherjee leaves you feeling as though you’ve just aced a college course for which you’d been afraid to register — and enjoyed every minute of it

[Siddhartha Mukherjee] is the perfect person to guide us through the past, present, and future of genome science … It is up to all of us—not just scientists, government officials, and people fortunate enough to lead foundations—to think hard about these new technologies and how they should and should not be used. Reading The Gene will get you the point where you can actively engage in that debate.

The Gene is prodigious, sweeping, and ultimately transcendent. If you’re interested in what it means to be human, today and in the tomorrows to come, you must read this book.

Dramatic and precise... [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... He is a natural storyteller... A page-turner... Read this book and steel yourself for what comes next .

The story […] has been told, piecemeal, in different ways, but never before with the scope and grandeur that Siddhartha Mukherjee brings to his new history, The Gene. He fully justifies the claim that it is “one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in the history of science.” … Definitive

[The Gene is] destined to soar into the firmament of the year's must reads , to win accolades and well-deserved prizes, and to set a new standard for lyrical science writing .

The Gene is as engaging, powerful and elegant a piece of science writing as you are likely to read this year … Mukherjee has three rare talents. The first is a shining prose style quite unlike anything else in his field… A novelist’s command of narrative and tone. The third and most unusual talent is an eye for the lustre among the manifold drudgeries of research… It takes a skilful writer to turn all the personalities and patients, data and ideas into something that is dramatic without being melodramatic… The Gene succeeds as a compelling story... For this alone, Mukherjee deserves another part-time Pulitzer.

Mukherjee is an assured, polished wordsmith… This is a big book, bursting with complex ideas… Well-written, accessible and entertaining account of one of the most important of all scientific revolutions, one that is destined to have a fundamental impact on the lives of generations to come. The Gene is an important guide to that future.

His sweeping and compellingly told history – and there is no more accessible and vivid survey available – is about hubristic ambition as much as stunning achievement.

Magisterial ... [ The Gene ] will confirm [Mukherjee] as our era’s preeminent popular historian of medicine . The Gene boasts an even more ambitious sweep of human endeavor than its predecessor ... Mukherjee punctuates his encyclopaedic investigations of collective and individual heritability, and our closing in on the genetic technologies that will transform how we will shape our own genome, with evocative personal anecdotes, deft literary allusions, wonderfully apt metaphors, and an irrepressible intellectual brio

Siddhartha Mukherjee is the author of The Song of the Cell; The Gene: An Intimate History, a #1 New York Times bestseller; The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer , winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction; and The Laws of Medicine . He is the editor of Best Science Writing 2013 . Mukherjee is an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer physician and researcher. A Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School. In 2023, he was elected as a new member of the National Academy of Medicine. He has published articles in many journals, including Nature , The New England Journal of Medicine , Cell , The New York Times Magazine , and The New Yorker .

Visit his website at: SiddharthaMukherjee.com