Review
------
"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 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, 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 and grandeur that Siddhartha
Mukherjee brings to his new history, The Gene. He fully justifies the cl 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))
About the Author
----------------
Siddhartha Mukherjee is a cancer physician and researcher, a stem cell biologist and a cancer geneticist. He
is the author of The Laws of Medicine and The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, which won the 2011
Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction and the Guardian First Book Award.
Mukherjee is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University. A Rhodes Scholar, he graduated from Stanford
University, University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School. His laboratory has identified genes that regulate stem
cells, and his team is internationally recognized for its discovery of skeletal stem cells and genetic alterations in
blood cancers.
He has published work in Nature, Cell, Neuron, The New England Journal of Medicine, the New York Times and several other
magazine and journals. He lives with his family in New York City.
