The Gene: An Intimate History

Description

The 1 NEW YORK TIMES Bestseller The basis for the PBS Ken Burns Documentary
The Gene: An Intimate History 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).
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Features:

Product Details:

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Scribner; Illustrated edition (May 17, 2016)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 608 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1476733503
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 00
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.13 x 1.6 x 9.25 inches
• Best Sellers Rank: #36,825 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #23 in Genetics (Books) #37 in History of Medicine (Books) #121 in History & Philosophy of Science (Books)
• #23 in Genetics (Books)
• #37 in History of Medicine (Books)