The Gene

In The Gene: An Intimate History, Siddhartha Mukherjee traces genetics from Mendel’s pea plants to CRISPR, framing heredity as both a scientific and deeply personal story. Mukherjee, an oncologist, interweaves his own family’s history of mental illness—his father’s brothers affected by schizophrenia—to ask what it means to inherit a fate. The book moves through major figures and experiments: Mendel’s laws of segregation and independent assortment; Darwin’s puzzle over variation; Morgan’s fruit-fly work linking genes to chromosomes; Avery, MacLeod, and McCarty identifying DNA as the transforming principle; Watson, Crick, Franklin, and Wilkins solving the double helix; and the rise of recombinant DNA, the Human Genome Project, and gene therapy. Mukherjee develops recurring tensions—nature versus nurture, fate versus choice, and the metaphor of the “book of life” versus the gene as an instruction manual. He examines eugenics in the United States and Nazi Germany, the sad story of Carrie Buck, and later debates over IQ, sexuality, and race. The final sections address new tools like CRISPR and the ethical questions of editing human embryos, asking how far we should go in rewriting inheritance. Throughout, the narrative balances laboratory breakthroughs with the human consequences of genetic knowledge, including Mukherjee’s own experience of mapping his family’s mutations. The book is not a practical guide but a history and meditation on what genes explain—and what they do not.