There are many chambers of the human heart and many caverns in the human mind, but they are all there somewhere pinned onto the genome which is Tony. Seems I got more than blue eyes from Mom, more than dark hair from Dad. There's probably a gene that makes me so. Until next week's book and next week's cocktail party, that is. So, imagine me back from some journey, casting pleasantries aside, and launching wild-eyed and, yes, maybe a little frothy, insisting that you grasp the fraction of what I've learned via the fraction of my ability to explain, as if it is the most important thing in the world. As if, you know, I missed some of the froth. I have this tendency, when I read a book as brilliantly informing as this one, to wipe the froth from my mouth, shuffle the pages of notes I've written contemporaneous to the reading, and plunge into the cocktail party which is this forum, grabbing each of you by the virtual lapels, and launching into a lecture about one of the hundreds of things I learned in the process. 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. 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 coming to life, by the author of The Emperor of All Maladies. 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.

The Gene is the story of one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in our history, from bestselling, prize-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee.

The gene book siddhartha mukherjee