Promotional Information

The Gene is the story of one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in our history.

About the Author

Siddhartha Mukherjee is a cancer physician and researcher, a stem cell biologist and a cancer geneticist. He is the author of The Laws of Medicine and The Emperor of All Maladies- A Biography of Cancer, which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction and the Guardian First Book Award. Mukherjee is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University. A Rhodes Scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School. His laboratory has identified genes that regulate stem cells, and his team is internationally recognized for its discovery of skeletal stem cells and genetic alterations in blood cancers. He has published work in Nature, Cell, Neuron, The New England Journal of Medicine, the New York Times and several other magazine and journals. He lives with his family in New York City.

Reviews

"With a marriage of architectural precision and luscious narrative, an eye for both the paradoxical detail and the unsettling irony, and a genius for locating the emotional truths buried in chemical abstractions, Mukherjee leaves you feeling as though you’ve just aced a college course for which you’d been afraid to register — and enjoyed every minute of it"
*Washington Post*

"[Siddhartha Mukherjee] is the perfect person to guide us through the past, present, and future of genome science… It is up to all of us—not just scientists, government officials, and people fortunate enough to lead foundations—to think hard about these new technologies and how they should and should not be used. Reading The Gene will get you the point where you can actively engage in that debate."
*Gatesnotes*

"The Gene is prodigious, sweeping, and ultimately transcendent. If you’re interested in what it means to be human, today and in the tomorrows to come, you must read this book."
*Anthony Doerr, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All the Light We Cannot See*

"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."
*Sunday Times*

"The story […] has been told, piecemeal, in different ways, but never before with the scope and grandeur that Siddhartha Mukherjee brings to his new history, The Gene. He fully justifies the claim that it is “one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in the history of science.” … Definitive"
*New York Times Book Review*

"[The Gene is] destined to soar into the firmament of the year's must reads, to win accolades and well-deserved prizes, and to set a new standard for lyrical science writing."
*New York Times*

"The Gene is as engaging, powerful and elegant a piece of science writing as you are likely to read this year… Mukherjee has three rare talents. The first is a shining prose style quite unlike anything else in his field… A novelist’s command of narrative and tone. The third and most unusual talent is an eye for the lustre among the manifold drudgeries of research… It takes a skilful writer to turn all the personalities and patients, data and ideas into something that is dramatic without being melodramatic… The Gene succeeds as a compelling story... For this alone, Mukherjee deserves another part-time Pulitzer."
*The Times*

"Mukherjee is an assured, polished wordsmith… This is a big book, bursting with complex ideas… Well-written, accessible and entertaining account of one of the most important of all scientific revolutions, one that is destined to have a fundamental impact on the lives of generations to come. The Gene is an important guide to that future."
*Observer*

"His sweeping and compellingly told history – and there is no more accessible and vivid survey available – is about hubristic ambition as much as stunning achievement."
*Guardian*

"Magisterial ... [The Gene] will confirm [Mukherjee] as our era’s preeminent popular historian of medicine. The Gene boasts an even more ambitious sweep of human endeavor than its predecessor ... Mukherjee punctuates his encyclopaedic investigations of collective and individual heritability, and our closing in on the genetic technologies that will transform how we will shape our own genome, with evocative personal anecdotes, deft literary allusions, wonderfully apt metaphors, and an irrepressible intellectual brio"
*Elle magazine (US)*

"[It] takes a monumental and complex subject which is woven into every part of our lives and makes it both gripping and accessible."
*Guardian*

"Not just first-class science writing but an important intellectual contribution in its own right."
*Prospect*

"He writes with the natural flate of a seasoned novelist… [The Gene] is a pleasure to read… This is an exceptional book, and I thoroughly recommend it to every inquisitive person."
*Daily Mail*

"The book is compassionate, tautly synthesized… A page-turner."
*New York Times*

"Mukherjee is an outstanding guide…[The Gene] is a remarkably instructive, stimulating and, at every level of its generous construction, artful work of popular science."
*Times Literary Supplement*

"Visceral and thought-provoking descriptions of the horrors of early-twentieth-century US eugenics."
*Nature*

"Virtuoso performance… Remarkably clear and compelling prose… Glorious tour of human genetics."
*New York Times*

"Remarkable and thought-provoking book… Mukherjee explores in considerable and lucid detail… What he does magnificently is trace the history of the gene in illuminating detail… If you want to know what is happening now, this is an essential read."
*Mail on Sunday*

"Outstanding... an exceptional writer"
*The Times*

"A sweeping history of genetic theory and a considered look at where it might lead us in the future."
*Mail on Sunday, Book of the Year*

"Dazzling... There is nothing about Gene that is less than nuanced."
*The Times*

"A magnificent synthesis of the science of life, and forces all to confront the essence of that science as well as the ethical and philosophical challenges to our conception of what constitutes being human"
*Paul Berg, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry*

"Wise and lucid...excellent"
*BBC Radio 4 Start the Week*

"A tourist guide to the new Africa, the human genome… Mukherjee gives an exhaustive account of the development of the modern science of inheritance… Mukherjee does a good job of cutting away the web of ambiguity and complexity’"
*New Statesman*

"Written with the rollicking enthusiasm of sports journalism… Mukherjee has an ear for his subject’s rhetorical brilliance."
*Guardian Weekly*