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History. Medical. Sociology. Nonfiction. HTML: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 Prizeâ??winning author of The Emperor of All Maladiesâ??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." â??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 familyâ??with its tragic and bewildering history of mental illnessâ??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 experimentationâ??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 areâ??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… (more)
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There are some sections where he gives more than this reader needed - particularly in the latter part of the book where he explains missteps in detail before success is obtained. No doubt those sections would be of particular interest to a student, but briefer would've been fine with me.
Mukherjee is thoughtful about bigger issues, as well as being a skilled author. Here's a couple of quotes that stood out for me. The first quote is from artist Edward Munch, and comes in the author's discussion of how schizophrenia and other mental diseases sometimes are linked to exceptional creativity:
{My troubles} are part of me and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and treatment would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings.
In a eugenics discussion, Mukherjee points out this sorry story:
"Readers from India and China might note, with some shame and sobriety, that the largest 'negative eugenics' program in human history was not the systematic extermination of the Jews in Nazi Germany or Austria in the 1930s. That ghastly distinction falls on India and China, where more than 10 million female children are missing from adulthood because of infanticide, abortion and neglect."
It's not a book like I Contain Multitudes, which is so attractively written that I'm sure it's read by many with only a marginal interest in microbes. My guess is that mainly fans of the subject matter or the author, or both, will read this one. They'll get plenty to enjoy and think about, including the ethical issues raised by our increasing ability to modify genes and potentially select for desirable traits.
For the interested reader, this book offers a very
Though it can a little technical and dense, these occasions are few and far in between.
On the whole, very essential read.
The final 25-30% of this book is more philosophical
All-in-all an excellent - but not an easy - read.
Starting with Charles Darwin and Gregor Mandel and working his way through history to the present and future of genetic
The author, himself a practicing physician, gives us the broad history and a personal view, as his family has had a genetic tendency towards schizophrenia and bipolar disease. He addresses the darker side of genetics history with a chapter on eugenics, mentions controversies such as the work either inadvertently borrowed or purposely stolen from Rosalind Franklin when Watson and Crick were modeling DNA, and treads lightly - sometimes with really insightful comments - on ethical questions about our scientific abilities to mess with the human genome. It's a thorough yet accessible history that I recommend to anyone interested in genetics.
This book was neither. It was such a disappointment.
It is extremely uninformative. If you've had high-school biology (outside of Kansas?), you know all about the basics of genetics,
Moreover, the book is poorly written. The writing is incredibly, astoundingly, unbelievably self-indulgent. One adjective won't do if he can think of ten. One metaphor won't do if he can think of three. One sentence won't do if he can write a page. (Do you get my point?) (Even the chapters sometimes begin with three gratuitous quotes.)
There was no editor. To the contrary, you get the sense that he kept index cards of every metaphor he came across, and every single one is included. He can't choose.
"Proteins, recall, are the hubs of the biological world. They are the enablers and the disablers, the machinators, the regulators, the gatekeepers, the operators, of cellular reactions. They are the switches that most drugs seek to turn on and off."
If you've never heard of DNA, then you are in luck, because Mukherjee explains how A and T, and G and C are paired up probably dozens of times.
Mukherjee tries to weave in his own personal story, of his family's history with mental disease. To his credit, he doesn't veer into melodrama. But it never adds up to anything, and feels like a shoehorned excuse for writing this book rather than the real reason.
I had seen the PBS documentary "Cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies" which was based on the author's first book (although I had not read the book). The format of The Gene is very similar. The book will go to my all time favorites list, and I hope to see a PBS documentary based on it soon.
Once again, time constraints prohibited me from finishing this book before I had to return it to the library from which I had borrowed it. I hope to return to it in the future.
Mukherjee personalizes the presentation by interposing a discussion of how heredity affects his own family, which has a history of mental illness.
Mukherjee also tackles the important subject of the sociological uses of gene science, from eugenics to race theory. He does an excellent job of discussing the thorny moral and legal issues presented by the power to alter real human beings by manipulating their genotypes. He recounts the horrific repercussions of such applications, including forced sterilization and genocide, and debunks theories that there are significant differences between groups that humans classify as “races.”
One really has to pay attention while reading this book or the ideas presented will just whoosh by without being understood. Along with “dense,” I would add the adjectives learned, literate, comprehensive, historical, personal, and intimate. It’s really quite good, and well worth the effort to understand it.
(JAB)
Mukherjee organizes the book primarily chronologically, and describes centuries of history and research to identify and analyze the basic building blocks of life, from the ancient Greeks, through Mendel's pea experiments, to the mapping of the human genome and beyond. As our knowledge of the role of genes, and the possibilities of genetic modification grow, the science, and the ethical and philosophical issues raised become more complicated and difficult.
I have to say that before reading this book I was completely illiterate about microbiology, biochemistry and genetics. I didn't know the difference between DNA and RNA, between a gene and a chromosome. Now I can hold a basic conversation on some of these scientific issues with my daughter who will be receiving her Ph.D. in genetics this fall. She was very impressed that I knew what "epigenetics" was, and that I had heard of CRISPR, a technology she uses in her research.
Highly Recommended.
4 1/2 stars
Siddhartha Mukherjee
May 17, 2017
I finished this book about 4 days ago, it took about 2 weeks to read, held my interest throughout. Mukherjee writes very well, and includes his family's genetic history of schizophrenia as a way of personalizing the book. The mechanism of
I have studied much of this material, and therefore flew through many of the explanations aimed at those unfamiliar with biochemistry. That helped me keep up the reading pace, and I was always entertained
As a historian myself, I often find that the science of history is the best way for me to understand science. That is, if I can learn how our understanding of a scientific topic has changed, an dhow we discovered what we know, I usually
Genetics is fascinating, but the history of our understanding is also fascinating. It is full of moral quandaries, breakthrough discoveries, interesting personalities, and landmark events.
It is also fascinating to see where we stand right now, how much we have to learn, and how much progress we are making right now. The possibilities are amazing and daunting.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book—very readable prose, fascinating history, timely questions, and the overwhelming sense of “Wow!” What we can do, what we can’t, what mistakes we’ve made and how… The author offers a fascinating tale of discovery, filled with a sense of discovery (even for the reader who’s already looked for lots of answers). It's a tale of great people; great (and all too repeatable) errors of judgement; great stories; and a truly informative look at genes, genetics, science and humanity. I love this book!
Disclosure: I was given it as a Christmas present and was hooked as soon as I began reading.
This book is timely. The techniques described in this book are being used to create COVID-19 vaccines (though the book itself pre-dates the current pandemic), including messenger RNA. I wanted to read it to understand further the science behind these genetic advances.
Mukherjee provides examples of where genetic science has gone awry in the past, such as in the misguided eugenics movement. The author also highlights success stories, and the encouraging results from trials in the use of gene therapy to assist those suffering from specific medical conditions.
It is a good discussion starter. It provides much food for thought. Since biotechnology has become part of the medical landscape, I think it is a good idea to be informed.