About the book
Physician and oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee writes a history of the gene and of genetic research, from Aristotle and Pythagoras through Mendel and Darwin to Franklin, Watson and Crick and the scientists who later mapped the human genome. The story runs from a monk in a Moravian abbey who hit upon the idea of a unit of heredity, through Nazi eugenics, to present efforts to read and write human DNA. Woven through it is Mukherjee's own family history of mental illness. He also cautions against letting genetic predispositions define a person or fate, a mindset he links to the rise of eugenics. It was shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize and received the Phi Beta Kappa Society's science book award.
It appears on a list of science books Bill Gates thinks everyone should read, where Gates wrote that Mukherjee aimed it at a lay audience because new genome technologies are about to affect everyone.
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Bill Gates (CEO/Microsoft)
"Mukherjee wrote this book for a lay audience, because he knows that the new genome technologies are at the cusp of affecting us all in profound ways," Gates wrote. Mukherjee is what Gates calls a "quadruple threat." He's a practicing physician, teacher, researcher, and author.
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