The Gene is the story of one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in our history. NEW YORK TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER The Gene is the story of one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in our history from the author of The Emperor of All Maladies.The story begins in an Augustinian abbey in 1856, and takes the reader from Darwin's groundbreaking theory of evolution, to the horrors of Nazi eugenics, to present day and beyond - as we learn to \"read\" and \"write\" the human genome that unleashes the potential to change the fates and identities of our children.Majestic in its scope and ambition, The Gene provides us with a definitive account of the epic history of the quest to decipher the master-code that makes and defines humans - and paints a fascinating vision of both humanity's past and future.For fans of Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking and Being Mortal by Atul Gwande.'Siddhartha Mukherjee is the perfect person to guide us through the past, present, and future of genome science' Bill Gates'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...Read this book and steel yourself for what comes next' Sunday Times
 
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”
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)