An epic, dazzling history of the idea that defines us.

From Gregor Mendel’s pea plants to the discovery of DNA and the CRISPR revolution in gene-editing, The Gene tells the story of how we came to understand heredity – to decipher the master-code that makes and defines humans – land how that knowledge now allows us to rewrite life itself. Siddhartha Mukherjee combines scientific insight with personal history, weaving in his own family’s struggles with mental illness to explore the moral frontiers of genetics.

This is science writing of the highest order, humane, lyrical, and profound, showing how the study of genes illuminates both our biological destiny and our deepest hopes.

‘Siddhartha Mukherjee is the perfect guide to genome science’ Bill Gates

‘Thrilling and comprehensive’ Sunday Times

Prizes

Short-listed for Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize 2016 (UK),Short-listed for Wellcome Book Prize 2017 (UK)

With a marriage of architectural precision and luscious narrative, an eye for both the paradoxical detail and the unsettling irony, and a genius for locating the emotional truths buried in chemical abstractions, Mukherjee leaves you feeling as though you’ve just aced a college course for which you’d been afraid to register — and enjoyed every minute of it -- Andrew Solomon * Washington Post *
[Siddhartha Mukherjee] is the perfect person to guide us through the past, present, and future of genome science… It is up to all of us—not just scientists, government officials, and people fortunate enough to lead foundations—to think hard about these new technologies and how they should and should not be used. Reading The Gene will get you the point where you can actively engage in that debate. -- Bill Gates * Gatesnotes *
The Gene is prodigious, sweeping, and ultimately transcendent. If you’re interested in what it means to be human, today and in the tomorrows to come, you must read this book. -- Anthony Doerr, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All the Light We Cannot See
Dramatic and precise... [A] thrilling and comprehensive account of what seems certain to be the most radical, controversial and, to borrow from the subtitle, intimate science of our time... He is a natural storyteller... A page-turner... Read this book and steel yourself for what comes next. -- Bryan Appleyard * Sunday Times *
The story […] has been told, piecemeal, in different ways, but never before with the scope and grandeur that Siddhartha Mukherjee brings to his new history, The Gene. He fully justifies the claim that it is “one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in the history of science.” … Definitive -- James Gleick * New York Times Book Review *
[The Gene is] destined to soar into the firmament of the year's must reads, to win accolades and well-deserved prizes, and to set a new standard for lyrical science writing. * New York Times *
The Gene is as engaging, powerful and elegant a piece of science writing as you are likely to read this year… Mukherjee has three rare talents. The first is a shining prose style quite unlike anything else in his field… A novelist’s command of narrative and tone. The third and most unusual talent is an eye for the lustre among the manifold drudgeries of research… It takes a skilful writer to turn all the personalities and patients, data and ideas into something that is dramatic without being melodramatic… The Gene succeeds as a compelling story... For this alone, Mukherjee deserves another part-time Pulitzer. -- Oliver Moody * The Times *
Mukherjee is an assured, polished wordsmith… This is a big book, bursting with complex ideas… Well-written, accessible and entertaining account of one of the most important of all scientific revolutions, one that is destined to have a fundamental impact on the lives of generations to come. The Gene is an important guide to that future. -- Robin McKie * Observer *
His sweeping and compellingly told history – and there is no more accessible and vivid survey available – is about hubristic ambition as much as stunning achievement. * Guardian *
Magisterial ... [The Gene] will confirm [Mukherjee] as our era’s preeminent popular historian of medicine. The Gene boasts an even more ambitious sweep of human endeavor than its predecessor ... Mukherjee punctuates his encyclopaedic investigations of collective and individual heritability, and our closing in on the genetic technologies that will transform how we will shape our own genome, with evocative personal anecdotes, deft literary allusions, wonderfully apt metaphors, and an irrepressible intellectual brio * Elle magazine (US) *

Siddhartha Mukherjee is the author of The Song of the Cell; The Gene: An Intimate History, a #1 New York Times bestseller; The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction; and The Laws of Medicine. He is the editor of Best Science Writing 2013. Mukherjee is an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer physician and researcher. A Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School. In 2023, he was elected as a new member of the National Academy of Medicine. He has published articles in many journals, including Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, Cell, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker.

Visit his website at: SiddharthaMukherjee.com