The Gene

Science and nature

First published: 2016
Print length: 594 pagesScribner, 2017

Description

Siddhartha Mukherjee traces the gene from early speculation about heredity through the experiments and rivalries that produced modern genetics and the mapping of the human genome. Aristotle, Crick, Watson, Franklin, and generations of researchers appear within a history that connects scientific discovery to changing ideas about human traits, illness, and well-being. Mukherjee also brings the subject into his own family through its history of mental illness, showing how genetic knowledge can become intimate before it becomes conclusive. Alongside medicine’s growing power to interpret inheritance, he follows the dangerous appeal of treating predisposition as destiny, including its role in eugenics. The book presents genetics as both an explanatory science and an ethical challenge whose language can illuminate identity or imprison it.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Descriptive · Journalistic · Lyrical · Technical

Pace

Measured

Tone

Cerebral · Earnest · Intimate · Reflective

Structure

Braided · Chronological nonfiction

Focus

Ideas · Information · Voice

Emotional intensity

3 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 4 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 4 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

FamilyIdentityKnowledge and truthMental healthMoralityOppression

About Siddhartha Mukherjee

Siddhartha Mukherjee is an Indian-American physician, biologist, and writer whose work joins clinical knowledge with a historian’s sense of how science develops. Trained as a hematologist and oncologist, he researches the relationship between normal stem cells and cancer cells, experience that gives his popular science writing both technical authority and a practical concern with medicine. His books take large biological subjects and reconstruct the experiments, rivalries, conceptual shifts, and therapeutic advances that made them intelligible. The Emperor of All Maladies treats cancer as a historical entity shaped by successive efforts to diagnose and treat it, while The Gene and The Song of the Cell follow the emergence of heredity and cellular life as organizing ideas. Mukherjee characteristically moves between archival history, scientific studies, and personal or clinical experience. Across this work, he is especially interested in how basic discoveries alter the understanding of disease and open new possibilities for treatment.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Scribner
Language: English
ISBN: 9781476733524

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