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Curriculum in Cardiology
Book Club
The Gene: An Intimate History
Author : Siddhartha Mukherjee
Subject : Genetics
Language : English
Published by : Large Print Press (May 17, 2016)
Price : INR 399 (Amazon India)
Pages : 592
ISBN : 978-1432837815
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the
most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most
adaptable to change.”
– Charles Darwin
As captivating as the idea of Big Bang theory is, there exists
a Big Bang Theory of Biology which is equally compelling,
how what we know of genetics, is merely the tip of the iceberg.
Siddhartha Mukherjee in his phenomenal work, The Gene,
draws a panorama in front of our intrigued minds as to how far
we have come as the human race, yet what lies undiscovered
ahead.
This book is a biography of the gene, intelligently intertwining
not only the obvious genetic and biological but also the
underlying social and human aspects of this science.
It is a tale of time, not necessarily chronological, as Mukherjee
takes us back to the era of Pythagoras and Aristotle, while
both put forward fairly distinct ideas, there was a striking
similarity in their absent understanding of the “carrier
substance.” Acknowledging Gregor Mendel, marking the
first few fundamental ventures of genetic studies, the study
that founded modern biology was with his work on breeding
the pea plants and then onto Charles Darwin, having a knack
for evolutionary observations, who later gave us the Origin of
Species, although a theory of heredity was yet to be established.
Throughout this timeline, Heredity was the “missing science,”
and an absent particle, the constitutional matter of importance
that we now know as the gene.
Further studies on Mendel’s work discovering the basic unit
took shape and finally a Danish botanist, Wilhelm Johannsen,
gave it a name “Gene.”
With the paramount discovery of gene came an enormous wave
of revolution. Our world was soon bubbling with the ideas of
Francis Galton’s eugenics selective breeding of the strongest,
smartest and fittest humans, in an aim to achieve what nature
has been attempting for eons in a shorter course of time. Our
understanding of the gene pool was advancing, and we could
238 © 2019 Journal of the Practice of Cardiovascular Sciences | Published by Wolters Kluwer - Medknow
finally put together the floating puzzle pieces of linkage and
crossing over, crediting this to a series of experiments by Morgan.
By the 1930s, the Nazi geneticists had been inspired by these
bewildering discoveries, and we witnessed an immediate
adoption of our knowledge of genes into the Hitler Regime.
The gene had now become as Mukherjee says, “one of the
most dangerous ideas in history.”
Relatively, newer research led us to DNA, RNA, the double
helix structure in Watson and Crick models. Transformation,
transcription, gene regulation, codons, and their occurrence in
triplets followed not very long after.
The latest has been the Human Genome Project, which laid
down before us a universe of infinite possibilities.
The book constantly leaves us in a state of flux, challenging our
brains to look beyond the vast possibilities than what merely
meets the eye. As we continuously learn how to transcend
genes and conquer the unexplored arenas of Recombinant
DNA Technology, as we strive our way into the Post‑Genomic
World, what comes our way in the future is hard to establish.
The gene defines who we are but at the same time is not
definitive.
The Gene by Siddharth Mukherjee is quite aptly an intimate
history, as it pulls in front of us a mirror, that reflects what it
was, is, and what means to be human in the future to come.
He concludes with an abstract drawn between variation and
constancy, flux, and fidelity and between divisibility and
permanence and ends by saying that this very abstract “is the
most human of all things that we possess.”
Siddhartha Mukherjee is an Indian‑American physician,
biologist, oncologist, and author. He is best known for his
2010 book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of
Cancer that won notable literary prizes including the 2011
Pulitzer Prize.
Financial support and sponsorship
Nil.
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Singh: The gene: An intimate history

Conflicts of interest This is an open access journal, and articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative
There are no conflicts of interest. Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License, which allows others to
remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as appropriate credit
is given and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms.
Mahima Singh
Undergraduate Student, Bharati Vidyapeeth Medical College, Access this article online
Pune, Maharashtra, India.
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E‑mail: memahi1997@gmail.com Website:
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DOI:
10.4103/jpcs.jpcs_62_18

How to cite this article: Singh M. The gene: An intimate history. J Pract
Cardiovasc Sci 2018;4:238-9.

Journal of the Practice of Cardiovascular Sciences  ¦  Volume 4 ¦ Issue 3 ¦ September-December 2018 239