The Gene, Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Gene, Siddhartha Mukherjee
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The Gene
An Intimate History

Bestseller

Author: Siddhartha Mukherjee

Narrator: Dennis Boutsikaris

Unabridged: 19 hr 23 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/17/2016

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included


Synopsis

2017 Audie Award Finalist for Non-Fiction

The #1 NEW YORK TIMES Bestseller
The basis for the PBS Ken Burns Documentary The Gene: An Intimate History

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies—a fascinating history of the gene and “a magisterial account of how human minds have laboriously, ingeniously picked apart what makes us tick” (Elle).

“Sid Mukherjee has the uncanny ability to bring together science, history, and the future in a way that is understandable and riveting, guiding us through both time and the mystery of life itself.” —Ken Burns

“Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee dazzled readers with his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies in 2010. That achievement was evidently just a warm-up for his virtuoso performance in The Gene: An Intimate History, in which he braids science, history, and memoir into an epic with all the range and biblical thunder of Paradise Lost” (The New York Times). In this biography Mukherjee brings to life the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices.

“Mukherjee expresses abstract intellectual ideas through emotional stories…[and] swaddles his medical rigor with rhapsodic tenderness, surprising vulnerability, and occasional flashes of pure poetry” (The Washington Post). Throughout, the story of Mukherjee’s own family—with its tragic and bewildering history of mental illness—reminds us of the questions that hang over our ability to translate the science of genetics from the laboratory to the real world. In riveting and dramatic prose, 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, all the way through the revolutionary twenty-first century innovators who mapped the human genome.

“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), The Gene is the revelatory and magisterial history of a scientific idea coming to life, the most crucial science of our time, intimately explained by a master. “The Gene is a book we all should read” (USA TODAY).

About Siddhartha Mukherjee

Siddhartha Mukherjee is the author of The Song of the Cell,The Gene: An Intimate History, a #1 New York Times bestseller; The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction; and The Laws of Medicine. He is the editor of Best Science Writing 2013. Mukherjee is an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer physician and researcher. A Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School. In 2023, he was elected as a new member of the National Academy of Medicine. He has published articles in many journals, including NatureThe New England Journal of MedicineCell, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker. He lives in New York with his wife and daughters. Visit his website at: SiddharthaMukherjee.com.

About Dennis Boutsikaris

Dennis Boutsikaris won an OBIE Award for his performance in Sight Unseen and played Mozart in Amadeus on Broadway. Among his films are *batteries not included, The Dream Team, and Boys On the Side. His many television credits include And Then There Was One, Chasing the Dragon, and 100 Center Street.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Always on May 14, 2020

I think this was really good, and even better than The Emperor of All Maladies which I just read recently as well. I might have enjoyed this one more because it's relevant to my current day to day thing though. I really liked the way it ties in the personal elements of genetics through out the book......more

Goodreads review by Riku on June 06, 2017

Not half as good a narrative as The Emperor of All Maladies, but still a good account of the Gene's journey and where it is going. It will hold your attention even if you have read multiple accounts of the progress of Genetics such as Watson's, because most histories of the Gene focus on the Genome......more

Goodreads review by Ayse_ on August 06, 2017

In this beautifully written, vivid history of genetics; Mukherjee takes us by the hand and walks us through the hall of fame of all the people who are the reason for modern biology as we study it today. His picturesque descriptions make the book a joy to read. Starting with Mendel and ending with emb......more

Goodreads review by Bradley on February 09, 2017

Thanks goes to Netgalley and a wonderful author for a wonderfully told series of stories within the world of genetics. I was worried, briefly, by the insistence of bringing Aristotle's take on the genome, or the recapitulation of many of the grandfathers of the science, such as Mendel and Darwin, but......more