The Gene - a book review

 Written by  Siddhartha Mukherjee.  A very learned man.  Winner of the Pulitzer and so on.  This book is a tome and I could only finish reading it in a matter of days because I have nothing better to do.  I  had previously read another book he wrote about cancer.  That was intense.

'The Gene' is also characteristically profound.  It spans a period of 1,000 years in history and focuses on the one common denominator of all that is alive - the gene.  The manual for living creatures.

The book specifically steers its focus toward discussing the human genome (the collection of all the code needed to make us human) and what it means in the arc of time from the past to the present condition and to what the future may hold.

The book is phenomenal not because of being well researched and thought provoking but because it connects the dots with so many other fields in sciences and humanities.  It shows the reader that all disciplines and study that mankind has performed or does are inextricably linked.  It is consistent with the idea that we are one species with multiple ways of presenting our intellect and shaping the direction of the future.

The complete title of the book is - The Gene: An Intimate History.  It is intimate because the author tells it from a personal standpoint where members of his extended paternal family have been afflicted with mental illness and he pondered if that would affect him or his children.

History, specifically science of the gene the books tells us was shaped not merely by biologists or medical professionals but by mathematicians and also economists in their own ways.  Pythagoras had proposed the concept of a child as a parallel to the famous theorem we know him for.  Hypotenuse of a triangle is a mathematical derivative of the other two sides of the right angle triangle.  Similarly a child is a derivative of its two parents.  Plato then Aristotle further shaped this thinking and the latter proposed that we are created by instructions that are coded into us from both our biological creators.

The book describes Darwin's famous voyage across the Atlantic Ocean finally coming to live in the Galapagos islands and his habit of noting observed fact into his notebooks.  Obviously as he draws out his thinking on paper without a central God as creator, much different than Divine Interventionist would like to propose he was also trying to understand why one species disappeared and another took root.  Enter Malthus the economist with his theory of competition for resources.  That led to the survival of the fittest paradigm. 

All these stories weave to present day and present some chilling questions for the reader about the responsibility and burden of scientific discovery.  What happens as we contemplate gene mapping and gene control and genetic design?  Are we playing god? Ironic.

I have been fortunate to be able to do what I enjoy doing - read voraciously like a caterpillar feeding on mulberry leaves.  Being jobless has its perks.  And to boot in a nod to my own genetic code where my optical lens is starting to show its wear, I have gone progressive.  As in the type of lens fitting my optometrist suggested I use.  That said large print versions are my best friend these days and so is the public library.