Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing Nominee for Longlist
2016: Royal Society Prizes for Science Books shortlist.However, it is also a cautionary message toward not letting genetic predispositions define a person or their fate, a mentality that the author says led to the rise of eugenics in history. It delves into the personal genetic history of Siddhartha Mukherjee's family, including mental illness.
The book discusses the power of genetics in determining people's well-being and traits. The book chronicles the history of the gene and genetic research, all the way from Aristotle to Crick, Watson and Franklin and then the 21st century scientists who mapped the human genome. Majestic in its ambition, and unflinching in its honesty, The Gene gives us a definitive account of the fundamental unit of heredity-and a vision of both humanity's past and future.The Gene: An Intimate History is a book written by Siddhartha Mukherjee, an Indian-born American physician and oncologist. These concerns reverberate even more urgently today as we learn to 'read' and 'write' the human genome-unleashing the potential to change the fates and identities of our children. But woven through The Gene, like a red line, is also an intimate history-the story of Mukherjee's own family and its recurring pattern of mental illness, reminding us that genetics is vitally relevant to everyday lives. This is an epic, moving history of a scientific idea being brought to life, by the author of The Emperor of All Maladies.
Above all, this is a story driven by human ingenuity and obsessive minds-from Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel to Francis Crick, James Watson and Rosalind Franklin, and the thousands of scientists still working to understand the code of codes. It reorganizes our understanding of sexuality, temperament, choice and free will. It intersects with Darwin's theory of evolution, and collides with the horrors of Nazi eugenics in the 1940s. The story of the gene begins in an obscure Augustinian abbey in Moravia in 1856, where a monk stumbles on the idea of a 'unit of heredity'. Spanning the globe and several centuries, The Gene is the story of the quest to decipher the master-code that makes and defines humans, that governs our form and function.
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