– Anthony Doerr, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All the Light We Cannot See If you're interested in what it means to be human, today and in the tomorrows to come, you must read this book.' ' The Gene is prodigious, sweeping, and ultimately transcendent. Reading The Gene will get you the point where you can actively engage in that debate.'

' is the perfect person to guide us through the past, present, and future of genome science It is up to all of us – not just scientists, government officials, and people fortunate enough to lead foundations – to think hard about these new technologies and how they should and should not be used. 'With a marriage of architectural precision and luscious narrative, an eye for both the paradoxical detail and the unsettling irony, and a genius for locating the emotional truths buried in chemical abstractions, Mukherjee leaves you feeling as though you've just aced a college course for which you'd been afraid to register – and enjoyed every minute of it'

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. 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. 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. This is an epic, moving history of a scientific idea coming to life, by the author of The Emperor of All Maladies. This 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. It reorganizes our understanding of sexuality, temperament, choice and free will. It intersects with Darwin's theory of evolution, and collides with the horrors of Nazi eugenics in the 1940s. The story of the gene begins in an obscure Augustinian abbey in Moravia in 1856 where a monk stumbles on the idea of a 'unit of heredity'. Spanning the globe and several centuries, The Gene is the story of the quest to decipher the master-code that makes and defines humans, that governs our form and function.

The gene an intimate