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An Intimate History
Scribner
May 2016
On Sale: May 17, 2016
608 pages
ISBN: 1476733503
EAN: 9781476733500
Kindle: B017I25DCC
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author of The
Emperor of All Maladies—a magnificent history of the gene
and a response to the defining question of the future: What
becomes of being human when we learn to “read” and “write”
our own genetic information? The extraordinary Siddhartha Mukherjee has a written a
biography of the gene as deft, brilliant, and illuminating
as his extraordinarily successful biography of cancer.
Weaving science, social history, and personal narrative to
tell us the story of one of the most important conceptual
breakthroughs of modern times, Mukherjee animates the quest
to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on
our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices. Throughout the narrative, the story of Mukherjee’s own
family—with its tragic and bewildering history of mental
illness—cuts like a bright, red line, reminding us of the
many questions that hang over our ability to translate the
science of genetics from the laboratory to the real world. In superb prose and with an instinct for the dramatic scene,
he describes the centuries of research and
experimentation—from Aristotle and Pythagoras to Mendel and
Darwin, from Boveri and Morgan to Crick, Watson and
Franklin, all the way through the revolutionary twenty-first
century innovators who mapped the human genome. As The New Yorker said of The Emperor of All Maladies, “It’s
hard to think of many books for a general audience that have
rendered any area of modern science and technology with such
intelligence, accessibility, and compassion… An extraordinary achievement.” Riveting, revelatory, and
magisterial history of a scientific idea coming to life, and
an essential preparation for the moral complexity introduced
by our ability to create or “write” the human genome, The
Gene is a must-read for everyone concerned about the
definition and future of humanity. This is the most crucial science of our time, intimately
explained by a master.
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