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. “Mukherjee expresses abstract intellectual ideas through emotional stories… swaddles his medical rigor with rhapsodic tenderness, surprising vulnerability, and occasional flashes of pure poetry” ( The Washington Post). 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. 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). Siddhartha Mukherjee dazzled readers with his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies in 2010. '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

This is not a story of our distant future it is already embedded in our present).The basis for the PBS Ken Burns Documentary The Gene: An Intimate Historyįrom 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).

The identification of these disease-linked genes augurs a new era of genetic management, enabling parents to screen fetuses, and potentially abort them if they carry deleterious mutations (any person who has tested their unborn child for Down syndrome, cystic fibrosis, or Tay-Sachs disease, or has been tested herself for, say, BRCA1 or BRCA2 has already entered this era of genetic diagnosis, management, and optimization.

Two technologies transform genetics in the 1970s: gene sequencing and gene cloning-the “reading” and “writing” of genes (the phrase gene cloning encompasses the gamut of techniques used to extract genes from organisms, manipulate them in test tubes, create gene hybrids, and produce millions of copies of such hybrids in living cells.) In the 1980s, human geneticists begin to use these techniques to map and identify genes linked to diseases, such as Huntington’s disease and cystic fibrosis.

The gene an intimate