Title: The Gene Pdf An Intimate History
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning, best-selling author of The Emperor of All Maladies, a magnificent history of the gene and a response to the defining question of the future: What becomes of being human when we learn to "read" and "write" our own genetic information?
2017 Audie Award Finalist for Non-Fiction
The extraordinary Siddhartha Mukherjee has written a biography of the gene as deft, brilliant, and illuminating as his extraordinarily successful biography of cancer. Weaving science, social history, and personal narrative to tell us the story of one of the most important conceptual breakthroughs of modern times, Mukherjee animates the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices.
Throughout the narrative, the story of Mukherjee's own family - with its tragic and bewildering history of mental illness - cuts like a bright red line, reminding us of the many questions that hang over our ability to translate the science of genetics from the laboratory to the real world. In superb prose and with an instinct for the dramatic scene, he describes the centuries of research and experimentation - from Aristotle and Pythagoras to Mendel and Darwin, from Boveri and Thomas Morgan to Crick, Watson, and Rosa Franklin, all the way through the revolutionary 21st-century innovators who mapped the human genome.
As The New Yorker said of The Emperor of All Maladies, "It's hard to think of many books for a general audience that have rendered any area of modern science and technology with such intelligence, accessibility, and compassion.... An extraordinary achievement."
A riveting, revelatory, and magisterial history of a scientific idea coming to life and an essential preparation for the moral complexity introduced by our ability to create or "write" the human genome, The Gene is a must-listen for everyone concerned about the definition and future of humanity. This is the most crucial science of our time, intimately explained by a master.
A great history with a flaws If you are thinking of buying this book, please note the word "History" in the title. If you are looking for a history book on genetics, heritability and the human understanding of these things, this is a great book. If you are interested in deep technical descriptions or in understanding the latest in gene editing technology, this is not the right book.The great aspect of the book is that it weaves together and conceptualizes all the bits of genetics we remember from high school biology and various articles and books we have read over the decades. The author is very good at this. The book can give you an excellent basic understanding of the topic.The downsides: 1. The author attempts to weave personal family stories into the book and relate them to genetics. The stories are not interesting and are not tied into the narrative well. Fortunately, it is very easy to skip these sections. You lose nothing in your understanding if you just skip them. 2. Every time a sensitive topic comes up like eugenics, the author puts in a great deal of effort in virtue signaling about being on the right side of the topic. The endless condemning of Nazis is not really necessary. We kind of assume the author is not an admirer of Nazis. The author goes into a long straw man argument attempting to debunk "The Bell Curve" and then restates the primary thesis of the book as established fact. It looked like he had never read the book, but needed to condemn it so he could stay in academic good graces. 3. The later parts of the book fall short as the author gets into very recent technology. The early historical narratives are excellent. The later chapters lack quality and clarity.All in all, a very worthwhile book and I have not seen anything that would provide a better history. Read the book, just be aware that there are flaws.
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