Selected as a Book of the Year by The New York Times The Economist Independent Observer and
Mail on Sunday. THE NEW YORK TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER SHORTLISTED FOR THE WELLCOME BOOK
PRIZE 2017. "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 Gene is the story of one of
the most powerful and dangerous ideas in our history from bestselling prize-winning author
Siddhartha Mukherjee. Spanning the globe and several centuries The Gene is the story of the
quest to decipher the master-code that makes and defines humans that governs our form and
function. This is an epic moving history of a scientific idea coming to life by the author of
The Emperor of All Maladies. But woven through The Gene like a red line is also an intimate
history - the story of Mukherjee's own family and its recurring pattern of mental illness
reminding us that genetics is vitally relevant to everyday lives.These concerns reverberate
even more urgently today as we learn to "read" and "write" the human genome - unleashing the
potential to change the fates and identities of our children. The story of the gene begins in
an obscure Augustinian abbey in Moravia in 1856 where a monk stumbles on the idea of a 'unit of
heredity'. It intersects with Darwin's theory of evolution and collides with the horrors of
Nazi eugenics in the 1940s. The gene transforms post-war biology. It reorganizes our
understanding of sexuality temperament choice and free will. This is a story driven by human
ingenuity and obsessive minds - from Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel to Francis Crick James
Watson and Rosalind Franklin and the thousands of scientists still working to understand the
code of codes. Majestic in its ambition and unflinching in its honesty The Gene gives us a
definitive account of the fundamental unit of heredity - and a vision of both humanity's past
and future.
