The release date for the English version of 'The Gene: An Intimate History' by
Siddhartha Mukherjee is May 2016. If you enjoy this novel, it is available for buy as a paperback from Barnes & Noble or Indigo, as an ebook on the Amazon Kindle store, or as an audiobook on Audible.
The Gene is the narrative of the search to unravel the master code that creates and characterises people, determining our structure and abilities, and it takes place across several eras and continents.
The concept of a "unit of heredity" is discovered by a monk at a remote Augustinian monastery in Moravia in 1856, setting the stage for the discovery of the gene. It clashes with the atrocities of Nazi eugenics in the 1940s and with Darwin's idea of evolution. Post-war biology is transformed by the gene. It rearranges the way we think about sexuality, temperament, free will, and choice. From Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel to Francis Crick, James Watson, Rosalind Franklin, and the hundreds of scientists who are still trying to crack the code of codes, this is a tale propelled by human creativity and compulsive thinking.
The author of The Emperor of All Maladies presents an epic and poignant narrative of the realisation of a scientific concept. The tale of Mukherjee's own family and its recurrent pattern of mental illness, however, is also threaded across The Gene like a red line, serving as a poignant reminder of the important role that genetics plays in day-to-day life. The urgency of these issues has increased with the development of our ability to "read" and "write" the human genome, which has the potential to alter our children's identities and destiny.
The Gene offers us a clear explanation of the basic unit of heredity as well as a vision of both the history and future of mankind. It is majestic in its ambition and unwavering in its honesty.