The Gene, Siddhartha Mukherjee, 2016

The Gene Review

About

Published in 2016, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Gene: An Intimate History is both scientific chronicle and personal meditation on heredity. Following his Pulitzer-winning The Emperor of All Maladies, Mukherjee turns his lens to the code that defines life itself—the gene—and to humanity’s growing power to edit it. It’s part history, part memoir, and part ethical exploration, written with the grace of a novelist and the rigor of a scientist.

Overview

The book spans from Mendel’s pea experiments to CRISPR technology, charting the story of how we learned to read and rewrite the book of life. Mukherjee contextualizes each discovery within both scientific and human terms—showing how genetics has shaped medicine, identity, and even politics. Alongside this history runs his personal story: a family shadowed by inherited mental illness, grounding the science in empathy and moral reflection.

Summary

(light spoilers) Mukherjee recounts the evolution of genetic thought—from the early eugenic missteps of the 20th century to the dazzling breakthroughs of molecular biology. He celebrates pioneers like Watson and Crick, but also confronts the darker consequences of misused knowledge. As he moves toward the present, the narrative becomes increasingly introspective: what does it mean to alter the code that makes us human? The final chapters dwell on responsibility—acknowledging that power without wisdom risks repeating the past’s ethical failures. The tone is intimate, urgent, and reverent.

Key Themes / Main Ideas

• Knowledge and responsibility — science’s moral frontier.
• Identity — how genetics shapes selfhood and difference.
• Inheritance — both biological and emotional legacies.
• Progress and peril — power without ethics as danger.
• The poetry of science — discovery told through compassion.

Strengths and Weaknesses

• Strengths — Sweeping narrative linking personal and scientific history.
• Strengths — Elegant prose that makes genetics both accessible and profound.
• Weaknesses — Dense in places; philosophical reflections slow the pace.
• Weaknesses — Readers seeking a lab-focused text may find it too lyrical—but that’s its gift.

Reviewed with focus on themes, audience, and takeaways — Siddhartha Mukherjee