An intimate and often profound human history of a scientific idea and its consequencesSiddhartha Mukherjee
The gene, we learned, is not 'a blueprint' but a Janus-faced molecule, with one face turned toward the unlimited future, bristling with possibility, and the other, fixed upon the determined past, etched in code.Siddhartha Mukherjee
As language uses text to create sentences, genes use enzymes to generate molecules, morphologies, and minds.Siddhartha Mukherjee
Genetic abnormality had become a form of identity, and genetic uniqueness was something to be celebrated rather than silenced.Siddhartha Mukherjee
A gene, I imagined, was a mere cipher — inert, static, one-dimensional. In reality, genes are rife with activity, and alternative interpretations. They are dynamic three-dimensional entities.Siddhartha Mukherjee
Genes are storytellers. They record in their language the past interactions of a species with its environment.Siddhartha Mukherjee
One could substitute nature and nurture with a new dichotomy: 'What is viewed' versus 'How we view.'Siddhartha Mukherjee
To understand ourselves genetically, we need to read nature sideways, in its breadth, not vertically in its depth.Siddhartha Mukherjee
Families are systems of interconnected fates.Siddhartha Mukherjee
Genes cannot tell us how to categorize or comprehend human diversity. Genes can define a species, but a species is defined by its shared inheritance, not by its inherent differences.Siddhartha Mukherjee
To know one’s genome is to query one’s future.Siddhartha Mukherjee
Genes are made of DNA, but our life histories are made by forging DNA with experience.Siddhartha Mukherjee
The choices of genes are not binary, but spectral.Siddhartha Mukherjee
The story of the gene begins with the hunt for an abstract principle—the idea of a 'unit' of heredity.Siddhartha Mukherjee
The experiments inside the cell will go on. The only thing that has changed is our participation in those experiments.Siddhartha Mukherjee