Just Finished Reading The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Siddhartha Mukherjee is a distinguished cancer biologist who has a great talent that few scientists possess: the ability and passion for sharing his often very specialized and complex field with the general public.  A few years ago he wrote the highly-acclaimed book The Emperor of All Maladies, which was about that dreaded disease of cancer.  To do research into cancer these days necessarily involves one in the closely related and heavily overlapping field in biology known as genetics.  Mukherjee has in turn written another great popular science book: The Gene: An Intimate History, which covers this very interesting topic from its scientific history, controversies throughout the years, important breakthroughs along the way, and the future in genetics...

Mukherjee interspersed his narrative about genetics with personal accounts from his own eastern Indian family's history of mental disorders...that his family line on his father's side seemed predisposed toward developing schizophrenia and bipolar disorders pointed to heredity and the engine driving it: the gene.  He then recounted the history of modern genetics, concentrating heavily on the pea experiments of Gregor Mendel in the 19th century.  He covered the various competitions among scientists during that time and in the decades following to understand the principles of heredity as its study ultimately came down to the structure of the DNA molecule and how it interacts with its mirror RNA version and with proteins and other substances to transmit genetic information.  Along the way, bumps in the road to the truth have occurred, and the author focuses on these as well.  One such bump was the eugenics movement of the late 19th and early 20th century, which attempted to extend heredity to intelligence and apply it to racial types...with disastrous political and social consequences culminating in the travesties perpetrated not only in Hitler's Nazi Germany, but within America as well as women were forced into sterilization based on eugenics-based assessments.  Another bump was the Lysenko movement in the Soviet Union, which claimed that the gene could be directly altered by change in environment, with the result being the setback of that country's agriculture through policies enacted in line with this fallacy.  Ironically, in more recent years it was discovered that environmentally-induced changes could be inherited, but not by changing the actual genetic information but rather by the presence of proteins and other substances that could "turn on" and "turn off" specific genes.  This phenomenon is essential to the new subfield known as "epigenetics"...

This book delves fearlessly at times into pretty technical information, especially with regard to the chemicals involved with genes, their composition, and the processes resulting.  There's no doubt in my mind that I would have gotten more from the book with a better background in biology...unfortunately that's one area in my own education (of many, I'm sure) in which I am sorely lacking.  Oh well, our good author was wise enough not to dwell too long in technical narrative...which I recognize was necessary to effectively present this work...and would eventually go into an area that I could more readily grasp...

Mukherjee is very concerned about diseases and how much they can be traced back to the genetic code...the composite of all genes within humans, along with their arrangement, being known as the human genome.  It turns out that some diseases point to a single, specific gene (like Huntington's and sickle-cell anemia)...but most of them seem to be the product of more than one gene, acting together and often in conjunction with environmental factors. As genes responsible for birth defects like Down's syndrome were discovered, it became expedient to perform prenatal tests for pregnant women regarding the likelihood that the baby would be born with the defect.  And if the tests came back positive, then the question of abortion came into play.  As a matter of fact, the more we learn about how human traits specifically correspond to elements along the genome, it becomes more and more an ethical/moral question: how far should we go in determining our genetic future, both as individuals, families, and as humans collectively?  The rise in stem cell research and its applications to the alteration of the genome in order to "improve" it also raises the important question and its partner: what constitutes improvement...and how, with our still fledgling knowledge in this growing field, do we know that we aren't unintentionally creating genetic structures that are more harmful than helpful?

My very first introduction to the field of genetics was a Bell Science movie titled The Thread of Life, starring that "bald guy with glasses", Dr. Frank Baxter, back in 1967 when I was in the sixth grade.  Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Gene: An Intimate History is definitely a huge step up from that...but it still keeps me firmly planted as a non-scientist.  But I do feel that I am, if only a little, closer to understanding some of the issues that seem to continually arise about genetic research in the news every few months or so.  I recommend this book, and I may well come back to it from time to time...