Selected as a Book of the Year byThe New York Times,The Economist, Independent, ObserverandMail on Sunday

THE NEW YORK TIMESNUMBER ONE BESTSELLER

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WELLCOME BOOK PRIZE 2017

Dramatic and precise [A] thrilling and comprehensive account of what seems certain to be the most radical, controversial and, to borrow from the subtitle, intimate science of our time He is a natural storyteller A page-turner Read this book and steel yourself for what comes next Bryan Appleyard,Sunday Times

The Geneis the story of one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in our history, from bestselling, prize-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee.

Spanning the globe and several centuries,The Geneis the story of the quest to decipher the master-code that makes and defines humans, that governs our form and function.

This is an epic, moving history of a scientific idea coming to life, by the author ofThe Emperor of All Maladies. But woven throughThe Gene, like a red line, is also an intimate history the story of Mukherjees own family and its recurring pattern of mental illness, reminding us that genetics is vitally relevant to everyday lives. 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.

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. It intersects with Darwins theory of evolution, and collides with the horrors of Nazi eugenics in the 1940s. The gene transforms post-war biology. It reorganizes our understanding of sexuality, temperament, choice and free will. 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.

Majestic in its ambition, and unflinching in its honesty,The Genegives us a definitive account of the fundamental unit of heredity and a vision of both humanitys past and future.

Siddhartha Mukherjee is a cancer physician and researcher, a stem cell biologist and a cancer geneticist. He is the author ofThe Laws of MedicineandThe Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction and the Guardian First Book Award.

Mukherjee is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University. A Rhodes Scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School. His laboratory has identified genes that regulate stem cells, and his team is internationally recognized for its discovery of skeletal stem cells and genetic alterations in blood cancers.

He has published work inNature,Cell,Neuron,The New England Journal of Medicine,the New York Timesand several other magazine and journals. He lives with his family in New York City.