The Gene : An intimate history by Siddhartha Mukherjee

The front cover of The Gene has a blurb by Hugh Jackman who calls it “A fascinating read”, and a blurb by Bill Gates who calls Mukherjee “A fascinating storyteller” Both the blurbs are right, but blurbs by a Hollywood actor and a tech billionaire misled me in to thinking that this book is a casual read which gives an outline on the history of the gene – more novel than textbook. And that is the case for the first 200 pages or so which cover Mukherjee’s own family’s history with mental illness, Mendel, Darwin, de Vries, Galton, Morgan and his “fly lab”, and the race to identify the structure of DNA. But once I crossed that, it was uncharted territory. Darwin and Dalton were one thing, but Beadle, Tatum, Sanger and Berg were a completely different beast. The depth and complexity of the experiments increased exponentially (like all science, I guess) as the pages turned, and at one point the author starts to reduce the experiments to very simplistic terms; at which point I also slightly lost track about the “how” and the “what” was exactly happening.

Simian Virus 40 gene cut pasted into an E. coli gene? Hmm.. something something… EcoR1..

But no marks taken away from the book for that. There is no realistic way those experiments could be explained and simplified even further without losing their essence. The complexity of the processes only made me appreciate the ingenuity of the scientists and the technicians even more. The number of breakthroughs which came after decades spent hammering away on one vague idea goes to show the amount of patience (and luck) that is required to succeed in scientific research.

I also liked the way the ethical problems that were, are, and will be faced are tackled. Opinions of the author himself were kept to a minimum, and more of observations were presented. The author also refrained from providing a “path for the future” which I felt was a good decision seeing as that would have probably overshadowed the rest of the contents of the book.

I have probably absorbed somewhere around 70% of the book, and in a week, it will probably be down to 50% – which would still make me better informed than I was before I opened this book, and I am happy with that.