The idea of a resilience gene has since taken root, leading psychologists to propose that susceptible short-variant children – the worst behaved but better at responding to counselling – be targeted for scarce and costly intervention. “It is as if resilience itself has a genetic core,” says Mukherjee in this broad-ranging guide to modern genetics and its impact on life. That grim start to life was not quite so hopeless as it seemed. They found the former group, while more prone to antisocial behaviour, was also more likely to react positively to counselling. But the researchers went further, providing counselling for short-variant binge drinkers and long-variant “normals” to see how each group responded to help from others. Combine a deprived background with a set of “bad” genes and your chance in life was doomed, it appeared. We could ask for no wiser, more fascinating and talented writer to guide us into the future of our human heredity than Siddhartha Mukherjee.Sure enough, the scientists found that possessors of short variants were more likely to binge drink, use drugs and be sexually permissive. Through the rest of The Gene, Mukherjee clearly and skillfully illustrates how the science has grown so much more advanced and complicated since the 1920s-we are developing the capacity to directly manipulate the human genome-and how the ethical questions have also grown much more complicated. This is what can happen when we start tinkering with this most personal science and misunderstand the ethical implications of those tinkerings. Carrie Buck’s sterilization comes as a warning that informs the rest of the book.

Mukherjee opens with a survey of how the gene first came to be conceptualized and understood, taking us through the thoughts of Aristotle, Darwin, Mendel, Thomas Morgan, and others he finishes the section with a look at the case of Carrie Buck (to whom the book is dedicated), who eventually was sterilized in 1927 in a famous American eugenics case. Here, he follows up with a biography of the gene-and The Gene is just as informative, wise, and well-written as that first book. An Amazon Best Book of May 2016: In 2010, Siddhartha Mukherjee was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Emperor of All Maladies, a “biography” of cancer.

The gene siddhartha