It is a pretty good book that starts from high school biology and go all the way to making the concepts understand better.

This book is a combination of science, history, and stories. It is so well written and very engaging, but it does includes many details (and reads like a textbook for some of the time), so it's a bit of an effort to get through!

This read is loaded with information, and I mean, loaded. A great read but definitely a significant amount of details, but a break from that involving personal writing was enough to separate the read,

The Gene is an eye-opening introduction to the evolution of genetic medicine. Breaking down genetic disorders into the very DNA/RNA that forms them, this book explains the boundaries, barriers, and triumphs of modern day medicine. As a nurse, it was a very interesting read. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in medical nonfiction.
There were times when it was complex, using professional terms, and this at times hindered the flow of the reading, but overall the narrative was well-written.

Like the author's previous book, this one is a fascinating read. With a narrative that is both personal and informative, he knows how to keep his reader interested in the book. Although occasionally I felt the writer's tendency to talk about the family history a bit distracting, it was overall a great read. There was a lot of information in the book which took a bit of time to process. But I really enjoyed the book.

Science at it's best is a fascinating story, like any story it is filled with characters that you come to know, understand, care about and identify with. In addition you want to know what happens next and keep turning the pages late into the night., but how many science books are like that?
As you have guessed by now, this one is. Siddhartha Muckerjee has taken a complex, jargon laden subject and made it, not just accessible, but a wonderful exploration of a world we find we want to know more about.

(Skimmed as part of Wellcome Book Prize shortlist shadow panel.)

Siddhartha Mukherjee is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, where his lab specializes in stem cells and blood cancers. His book The Emperor of All Maladies, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2011, is among my most memorable reads of the past decade. Along with Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, it was one of the first books to turn me on to health-themed reading.

So it was a disappointment to find that I could never really engage with his second full-length work, The Gene: An Intimate History. There’s no denying this book’s impressive scope: it’s a comprehensive survey of the past 150 years of genetics research, but it also stretches back to antiquity to see the different ways people have imagined that heredity works. It’s a no-holds-barred science and social history text, both chronological and thematic in approach, and it also surprises with its breadth of literary reference (as in the epigraphs from 1Q84 and The Importance of Being Earnest). However, my favorite snippets were those that constitute a mini family memoir of the schizophrenia that runs through the author’s India-based family.

Part of the problem was that a lot of the early material concerning Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin is very familiar to me. High school genetics material has stayed fresh in my mind even though so many other subjects have faded, and I’ve done a lot of reading on Darwin for my Victorian Literature MA and on my own time. Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, then provides a segue into the dark side of genetics: eugenics. A lot of space is given to Nazism, but Mukherjee also hits closer to home with the case of Carrie Buck, a “feeble-minded” woman whose enforced sterilization the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed in 1927.

Other important figures in the history of genetics include Dutch botanist Hugo de Vries, Hermann Muller, Oswald Avery, Linus Pauling, and the famous English team that discovered the structure of DNA, Watson, Crick & Franklin. Parts Three and Four, which chronicle the advances in genetics that fell between the 1970s and early 2000s, struck me as particularly dull, whereas Part Five held my interest much more strongly in that it brings things up to date with the developments of the last 15 years, including epigenetics, genetic testing for breast cancer and schizophrenia, stem cell therapy and the search for a “gay gene.”

The book did leave me with a strong sense that our knowledge of genes – the least divisible unit of information about life – affects our understanding of the human identity and future:

"In the early decades of the twenty-first century, we are learning to speak yet another language of cause and effect, and constructing a new epidemiology of self: we are beginning to describe illness, identity, affinity, temperament, preferences—and, ultimately, fate and choice—in terms of genes and genomes. This is not to make the absurd claim that genes are the only lenses through which fundamental aspects of our nature and destiny can be viewed. But it is to propose and to give serious consideration to one of the most provocative ideas about our history and future: that the influence of genes on our lives and beings is richer, deeper, and more unnerving than we had imagined. This idea becomes even more provocative and destabilizing as we learn to interpret, alter, and manipulate the genome intentionally, thereby acquiring the ability to alter future fates and choices."

However, at nearly 500 very dense, small-print pages, this book will, I fear, struggle to find a broad readership. Is it for science majors and graduate students? They’re likely to have their own university-approved textbooks. Is it an introduction for the general layman? Without a keen interest in science and a determination to learn the last word about genetics, readers are unlikely to persist with such a tome. I have a greater than average interest in genetic diseases, yet couldn’t manage more than a desultory skim. Unlike The Emperor of All Maladies, I can’t see this becoming a modern classic of popular science writing. For me it’s this year’s Citizen Kane: an achievement I can objectively admire but not personally warm to.

My gut feeling: This was also shortlisted for the 2016 Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize. I think it was better suited to that prize’s aims than to the Wellcome Prize’s. Keeping in mind that “the Wellcome Book Prize aims to excite public interest and encourage debate around these topics [birth and beginnings, illness and loss, pain, memory, and identity],” I unfortunately can’t see Mukherjee having the necessary universal appeal.

An exhaustive (and exhausting) book on history of genetics. I'm glad I read it, but boy oh boy, am I ever glad I am done. My brain is overloaded with amazing information that will take a long while to digest. Some people find the author's constant digressions to his own family's history distracting and unnecessary, but I really enjoyed those. It created a personal narrative among the piles of tedious scientific data. Read it if you are seriously looking into the subject, but skip it in favour of something more casual, if passing interest is your only motivation.

A tour-de-force of science writing, the author has yet again managed to blend the deeply researched with the shockingly personal, this time discussing issues of family, legacy, mental health - and, of course, the discovery of the gene!