The Gene The Gene

The Gene

An Intimate History

    • 4.0 • 222 Ratings
    • $14.99

Publisher Description

The #1 NEW YORK TIMES Bestseller
The basis for the PBS Ken Burns Documentary The Gene: An Intimate History
Now includes an excerpt from Siddhartha Mukherjees new book Song of the Cell!

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).

GENRE
Professional & Technical
RELEASED
2016
May 17
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
608
Pages
PUBLISHER
Scribner
SELLER
Simon & Schuster Digital Sales LLC
SIZE
49.8
MB

Customer Reviews

crealock ,

The gene

An amazing read even for a person like myself who has never opened any medicine-related book!
It was an eye opener as well as a literary feat!
Thank you,
Vladimir Yampolsky

LaDarina32 ,

Audiobook has innacurate chapter listings

This review is for the audiobook UX. Even though the download seems to contain the full book, the chapter listings on the audiobook do not correspond to those in the actual book (they seem to be lifted from an entirely different book. Example: parts 3 to 6 seem to be contained under a chapter named “closing credits” which includes 20+ hours of the book), resulting in a poor user experience.

JunyPagan ,

Essential book for science (biology/genetics) lovers

An essential book to learn about one of the most important life sciences, genetics. Siddhartha Mukherjee is an excellent science communicator and historian.

The Emperor of All Maladies The Emperor of All Maladies
2010
The Song of the Cell The Song of the Cell
2022
The Laws of Medicine The Laws of Medicine
2015
A Cancer in the Family A Cancer in the Family
2016
El emperador de todos los males El emperador de todos los males
2014
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013 The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013
2013
She Has Her Mother's Laugh She Has Her Mother's Laugh
2018
Why Does E=mc2? Why Does E=mc2?
2009
Who We Are and How We Got Here Who We Are and How We Got Here
2018
The Concise Human Body Book The Concise Human Body Book
2019
The Rise and Reign of the Mammals The Rise and Reign of the Mammals
2022
Brief Answers to the Big Questions Brief Answers to the Big Questions
2018