Gene

Before the reader are three interpenetrating biographies: the ideas of the gene, human society in the course of its development, and the author's family into which this idea penetrated with the baggage of an inherited mental illness. On the pages of this epochal book, the concept of the gene originates in the vague conjectures of Aristotle about the informational nature of heredity and in Paracelsus's notions of homunculi, intertwines with the images of the people who created genetics in the 19th-20th centuries, gets involved in eugenic projects, and evolves into genome editing technologies. Observing the influence of genes on cellular and human fates as a scientist and physician, whose own family is haunted by an inherited ailment, Mukherjee infuses scientific history with the dramas of people with genetic diseases and highlights the ethical challenges we face, having learned to "read" and "write" in the language of DNA.