Description
Book SynopsisSpanning the globe and several centuries, this is the story of the quest to decipher the master-code that makes and defines humans, that governs our form and function. It is also an intimate history of the author's own family and its recurring pattern of mental illness, reminding us that genetics is vitally relevant to everyday lives.
Trade ReviewWith a marriage of
architectural precision and
luscious narrative, an eye for both the paradoxical detail and the unsettling irony, and a
genius for locating the emotional truths buried in chemical abstractions, Mukherjee leaves you feeling as though you’ve just aced a college course for which you’d been afraid to register — and enjoyed every minute of it -- Andrew Solomon * Washington Post *
[Siddhartha Mukherjee] is
the perfect person to guide us through the past, present, and future of genome science… It is up to all of us—not just scientists, government officials, and people fortunate enough to lead foundations—to think hard about these new technologies and how they should and should not be used. Reading
The Gene will get you the point where you can actively engage in that debate. -- Bill Gates * Gatesnotes *
The Gene is prodigious, sweeping, and ultimately transcendent.
If you’re interested in what it means to be human, today and in the tomorrows to come, you must read this book. -- Anthony Doerr, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All the Light We Cannot See
Dramatic and precise... [A]
thrilling and comprehensive account of what seems certain to be the most radical, controversial and, to borrow from the subtitle, intimate science of our time... He is a natural storyteller... A page-turner...
Read this book and steel yourself for what comes next. -- Bryan Appleyard * Sunday Times *
The story […] has been told, piecemeal, in different ways, but never before with the
scope and grandeur that Siddhartha Mukherjee brings to his new history,
The Gene. He fully justifies the claim that it is “one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in the history of science.” …
Definitive -- James Gleick * New York Times Book Review *
