This example of “supreme understatement” can be found in the 1953 Nature article by James Watson and Francis Crick detailing the molecular structure of DNA and it is just one towering milestone celebrated in Siddhartha Mukherjee’s artful new “intimate history” of the science of genetics. Mukherjee is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a stem cell biologist and cancer geneticist. He is also a talented science writer and his The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer won a Pulitzer Prize in 2011.
This new book is “intimate” first in its focus on key personalities involved in the epic discovery and elucidation of the gene, from the early observations of inborn “likeness” by Greek scholars to the meticulous work of the Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel demonstrating inheritance in pea plants, carried out at the same time as Darwin postulated his theories of evolution through natural selection, to further work on genetic traits in the fruit fly by cell biologist Thomas Morgan and the subsequent search for the “missing” biochemical mechanism that makes it all possible, in which Watson and Crick were so instrumental.
It is a prescient observation that Mukherjee explores in the latter half of the book, looking at the growth of biotechnology, the vast and even “dangerous” potential of recombinant DNA, cloning, gene therapy and the sequencing of the entire human genome, recording our evolutionary history in the carcasses of inactivated genes “littered throughout its length, like fossils decaying on a beach”.
This is a profound and engrossing book.