The Gene: An Intimate History

Brilliantly interweaving science, social history, and the story of his own family, Pulitzer Prize winner Siddhartha Mukherjee explains the science of genetics and confronts the extraordinary influence of heredity on our lives. With superb prose and 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 Morgan to Crick, Watson, and Franklin, and all the way through the revolutionary twenty-first-century innovators who are mapping the human genome. The Gene is also, crucially, a preparation for the moral complexity introduced by our ability to create or "write" a genome, and thus determine human fate. Riveting, majestic, revelatory, it is a must-read for everyone concerned about the definition and future of humanity.