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'The Gene': Science in all its fumbling glory

'Like Pythagoras' triangle, like the cave paintings at Lascaux, like the Pyramids in Giza, like the image of a fragile blue planet seen from outer space, the double helix of DNA is an iconic image, etched permanently into human history and memory," S

Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of "The Gene." Photo: Deborah Feingold.
Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of "The Gene." Photo: Deborah Feingold.Read more
    Published 

The Gene

An Intimate History

nolead begins By Siddhartha Mukherjee

Scribner. 592 pp. $30 nolead ends

nolead begins

Reviewed by

Jim Higgins

nolead ends 'Like Pythagoras' triangle, like the cave paintings at Lascaux, like the Pyramids in Giza, like the image of a fragile blue planet seen from outer space, the double helix of DNA is an iconic image, etched permanently into human history and memory," Siddhartha Mukherjee writes in The Gene: An Intimate History, a fascinating and often sobering history of how humans came to understand the roles of genes in making us who we are - and what our manipulation of those genes might mean for our future.

Mukherjee, an oncologist, won the Pulitzer Prize for The Emperor of All Maladies, a history of cancer and its treatment. Some stories from his medical practice are in the narrative history of Maladies; in The Gene he gets even more personal, writing about several family members with inherited mental illness.

He goes back to ancient Greece for early theories about how human characteristics are passed through generations, including Aristotle's surprisingly prescient thought that the transmission of heredity was primarily the transmission of information.

Nineteenth-century pioneers Gregor Mendel (whose abbot, Mukherjee jokes, "didn't mind giving peas a chance") and Charles Darwin are given their due in crisp, detailed accounts of their work. "The essence of Darwin's disruptive genius was his ability to think about nature not as fact - but as process, as progression, as history," Mukherjee writes.

Unfortunately, their advances indirectly led to the first, but hardly last, wave of eugenicists, and such horrors as the court-sanctioned sterilization of Carrie Buck to prevent her "feebleminded" line from continuing, and the Nazi eugenics program, including Josef Mengele's notorious studies of twins. "Mengele's experiments putrefied twin research so effectively, pickling the entire field in such hatred, that it would take decades for the world to take it seriously," Mukherjee writes.

The Gene captures the scientific method - questioning, researching, hypothesizing, experimenting, analyzing - in all its messy, fumbling glory, corkscrewing its way to deeper understanding and new questions. Mukherjee's thrilling account of how James Watson and Francis Crick developed the double-helix model also describes Rosalind Franklin's overlapping research. Approaching our own times, the pace of discovery quickens as researchers refine their questions and their tools, leading to the Human Genome Project and gene therapy - and to difficult ethical questions.

This review originally appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.