The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee will feature on the Radio 2 Fact not Fiction Book Club on Thursday 30 June.
The book was selected with the help of a panel made up of Reading Agency and library staff from across the UK. Find out more about the non-fiction strand of the Radio 2 Book Club.
You can win 10 copies of The Gene for your reading group – just visit our Noticeboard. We even have some discussion questions for your reading group to help you get started.
The Gene
The story of the gene begins in an obscure Augustinian abbey in Moravia in 1856 where Gregor Mendel stumbles on the idea of a ‘unit of heredity’. It intersects with Darwin’s theory of evolution, and collides with the horrors of Nazi eugenics in the 1940s. The gene transforms post-war biology. It reorganizes our understanding of sexuality, temperament, choice and free will. Above all, it is a story driven by human ingenuity and obsessive minds – from Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel to Francis Crick, James Watson and Rosalind Franklin, and the thousands of scientists still working to understand the code of codes.
This is an epic, moving history of a scientific idea coming to life by the author of The Emperor of All Maladies. But woven through The Gene, like a red line, is also an intimate history – the story of Mukherjee’s own family and its recurring pattern of mental illness, reminding us that genetics is vitally relevant to everyday lives. These concerns reverberate even more urgently today as we learn to “read” and “write” the human genome – unleashing the potential to change the fates and identities of our children.
Majestic in its ambition, and unflinching in its honesty, The Gene gives us a definitive account of the fundamental unit of heredity – and a vision of both humanity’s past and future.
Selection panel review
Our reading panel of public librarians found The Gene fascinating – here are some of their comments:
“This is an engaging and humane treatment of the subject, which by its nature can be incredibly specific and detailed. The author extrapolates well and helps to give broader explanations that this non-scientist appreciated. I also appreciate that the author neither skirts the horrors of eugenics across the world in the last hundred years nor dwells on the horrors of the Nazi/Mengele experiments.”
“This is a book as much about humanity and history, as it is about hard science. The Gene tells the history of human’s discovery of the gene and what we believed before and since this momentous discovery. Mukherjee is a compelling storyteller, explaining complex genetics in a way that is understandable while not being condescending. The history of science and the scientists who have shaped our world are fascinating characters in their own right, odd and idiosyncratic and awe-inspiringly intelligent (or not, in some cases).”
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.
Get involved
Tune in to the Radio 2 Arts Show on Thursday 30 June to hear an interview with Siddhartha Mukherjee talking about his book.
Have you read The Gene? You can share your thoughts with us on Twitter, using #TheGene. Want to see what other readers thought? Take a look at these reviews, or leave your own.
Want to find out more? Take a look at the Radio 2 Book Club Twitter feed or find out more on the Radio 2 Book Club website.
