The Gene : An Intimate History
Written by Siddhartha Mukherjee
The New York Times’ top-selling book the PBS’s foundation Documentary by Ken Burns An Intimate History of The Gene
A fascinating history of the gene and “a magisterial account of how human minds have laboriously , ingeniously picked apart what makes us tick” (Elle) , from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies . Sid Mukherjee “has the uncanny ability to bring together science , history and the future in a way that is compelling and understandable , guiding us through both time and the mystery of life itself ,” according to the New York Times . Kenneth BurnsIn 2010 , Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies , which won the Pulitzer Prize , astonished readers .
According to The New York Times , “That accomplishment was obviously just a warm-up for his virtuoso performance in The Gene : An Intimate History , in which he braids science , history and personal into an epic with all the range and biblical thunder of Paradise Lost . The struggle to comprehend human heredity and its unexpected impact on our lives , personalities , identities , destiny and decisions is brought to life by Mukherjee in this biography .
According to The Washington Post , “Mukherjee expresses abstract intellectual ideas through emotional stories…[and] wraps his medical rigor in rhapsodic tenderness , surprising vulnerability and sporadic flashes of pure poetry . ” The narrative of Mukherjee’s own family , with its terrible and perplexing history of mental illness , serves as a constant reminder of the uncertainties surrounding our capacity to apply genetics from the lab to the real world .
He traces centuries of inquiry and experimentation—from Aristotle and Pythagoras to Mendel and Darwin , from Boveri and Morgan to Crick , Watson and Franklin , all the way to the ground-breaking thinkers of the twenty-first century who mapped the human genome—in captivating and dramatic writing . The Gene is the revelatory and magisterial history of a scientific idea coming to life , the most important science of our time , intimately explained by a master .
It is described as “a fascinating and often sobering history of how humans came to understand the roles of genes in making us who we are—and what our manipulation of those genes might mean for our future” (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel) . We should everyone read The Gene, according to USA TODAY .
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