By Siddhartha Mukherjee
The history and science of heredity
Subject
Themes
A family history thick with mental illness sits at the centre of this account of heredity. A cousin institutionalised with schizophrenia, two uncles lost to bipolar disease and schizophrenia decades earlier, and a father haunted by the question of what has been passed down through his blood, all frame the central argument: the gene is one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in the history of science, ranked alongside the atom and the byte as an idea that trisects the twentieth century and reorganises how humans understand identity, illness, and fate.
A family history thick with mental illness sits at the centre of this account of heredity. A cousin institutionalised with schizophrenia, two uncles lost to bipolar disease and schizophrenia decades earlier, and a father haunted by the question of what has been passed down through his blood, all…
Published in 2016 as a follow-up to an earlier, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of cancer, this history of the gene arrives at a moment when genetic technology had just crossed a decisive threshold. CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing had been demonstrated only four years earlier, and the book's final…
Long before anyone could see a gene or isolate its chemistry, the concept had to be invented as an abstraction. Gregor Mendel never used the word gene; he spoke only of discrete, indivisible units of heredity that passed intact from parent to offspring, resisting the blending that Darwin's own…
Barely a generation separates Mendel's rediscovered pea experiments from Francis Galton's coining of the word eugenics, and the speed of that transition reveals something troubling about how quickly a scientific insight can be repurposed into an instrument of social control. Galton never understood…
Few questions test the explanatory power of genetics as sharply as identity, and the book uses three cases, sex, race, and sexual orientation, to show how genes can be both decisively powerful and stubbornly insufficient depending on which layer of identity is being examined. Sex offers the clearest…
Running beneath the book's account of laboratories, chromosomes, and Nobel Prizes is a second, more intimate narrative: the story of the author's own family, in which mental illness recurs across generations with a persistence that no single explanation can fully account for. Two uncles, Rajesh and…
Medicine's relationship to the gene evolves through three distinct stages across the book, moving from naming disease, to predicting it, to finally attempting to correct it, and each stage carries its own promises and its own catastrophic setbacks. The first stage, diagnosis, begins with physicians…
Gregor Johann Mendel, a peasant's son, joins an Augustinian monastery in Brno in 1843. He proves a poor parish priest but a gifted gardener, and twice fails the examination required to become a certified teacher, once describing mammals so badly that he lumps kangaroos with beavers. Sent to the…
In 1878 the young Dutch botanist Hugo de Vries visits Darwin in England for a conversation that redirects his career toward solving the mystery of heredity, a problem Darwin never published before his death in 1882. De Vries embraces pangenesis until embryologist August Weismann amputates the tails…
Genetics must reconcile its discrete units of heredity with continuous variation, evolution, and embryonic development. Ronald Fisher, a nearly blind mathematician, tackles why human traits like height appear as smooth bell curves rather than discrete states. In an influential 1918 paper he shows…
After Avery's discovery, DNA moves from biochemical afterthought to the centre of scientific attention, though Avery is denied the Nobel Prize partly due to a Swedish chemist's disbelief. Physicist Maurice Wilkins becomes an early convert and begins X-ray studies of DNA fibres alongside the…
In 1968 biochemist Paul Berg returns to Stanford fascinated by SV40, a tiny monkey virus that can insert itself quietly into a host chromosome. He wants to smuggle a foreign gene into SV40's circular DNA and use the virus to deliver it into human cells, but first needs a way to cut open and reseal…
In spring 2014 the narrator's eighty-two-year-old father falls from a rocking chair in Delhi, gashing his forehead and breaking his shoulder. Flying home, the narrator finds him disoriented, briefly confusing 2014 with 1946, the year his uncle died. Testing his father's gait, the narrator notices a…
By the mid-1980s, gene-by-gene hunting has proven frustratingly slow: it took twenty-five years to find the Huntington's gene, and the common breast-cancer gene BRCA1 remains undiscovered. James Watson argues the only solution is sequencing the entire human genome to serve as a master reference. The…
The narrator's mother Tulu and her identical twin Bulu are born in Delhi in 1942, genetically identical but diverging sharply in temperament. Their lives split further after marriage, Tulu to prospering Delhi and Bulu to a once-wealthy Calcutta family whose fortunes collapse. Despite drifting apart,…
While gene therapy stalls after Gelsinger's death, genetic diagnosis flourishes, illustrated through three case studies. Geneticist Mary-Claire King spends the 1970s and 1980s compiling family pedigrees of breast and ovarian cancer, eventually mapping a culprit gene to chromosome seventeen and…
By Siddhartha Mukherjee
Subject
Themes
A family history thick with mental illness sits at the centre of this account of heredity. A cousin institutionalised with schizophrenia, two uncles lost to bipolar disease and schizophrenia decades earlier, and a father haunted by the question of what has been passed down through his blood, all frame the central argument: the gene is one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in the history of science, ranked alongside the atom and the byte as an idea that trisects the twentieth century and reorganises how humans understand identity, illness, and fate.