The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee

This book is about the science of genes and heredity. However, the author was passionate enough to describe the centuries of research and experiments from Aristotle and Pythagoras to Mendel, from Boveri to Morgan, and ALLLLL the way through the revolutionary twenty first century. As a result, this book is more like an interesting documentary.

It is noteworthy that the science of genes has once been the main fuel of Nazism. Lebensunwertes Leben— “lives unworthy of living”, this eerie phrase escalated the logic of eugenics. Nazi’s program of sterilization soon turned into outright murder of the genetic defectives. Euthanasia victims were killed, corpse were dissected and brain tissues were preserved for experiments. Ironically, “lives unworthy of living” were apparently of extreme worth for the advancement of science—genetic studies.

This book, again, reminds me that knowledge of all domains are interconnected. Genes tapped into various subjects at once: biology, information science, history, philosophy and even psychiatry. Instead of introducing the subjects chronologically, the author arranged the topics thematically, extending the topic of genes outside of biology’s realm. 

As a reader who rarely commits to studies of biology, gene is an abstract, attractive and mysterious topic. If you think about it: Not a being in nature, on the face of it, insinuates the reality of gene. Scientists had to unravel structures in the data, the unforeseen constancies, conserved ratios, and numerical rhythms in order to tap into genetics’ hidden magic. The magic that explains how I ended up looking like a carbon copy of my dad and nothing like Kendall Jenner.