“The Gene: An Intimate History”

By Siddhartha Mukherjee

Scribner (592 pages, $30)

“Like Pythagoras’s triangle, like the cave paintings at Lascaux, like the Pyramids in Giza, like the image of a fragile blue planet seen from outer space, the double helix of DNA is an iconic image, etched permanently into human history and memory,” Siddhartha Mukherjee writes in “The Gene: An Intimate History,” a fascinating and often sobering history of how humans came to understand the roles of genes in making us who we are -- and what our manipulation of those genes might mean for our future.

Mukherjee, an oncologist, won the Pulitzer Prize for an earlier nonfiction book, “The Emperor of all Maladies,” a history of cancer and its treatment that also delved into the lobbying, fundraising and awareness effort known as the War on Cancer. Mukherjee interspersed some stories from his medical practice in the narrative history of “Maladies”; in “The Gene,” he gets even more personal, writing about several family members with inherited mental illness.

He goes back to ancient Greece for early theories about how human characteristics are passed through generations, including Aristotle’s surprisingly prescient thought that the transmission of heredity was primarily the transmission of information.

Nineteenth-century pioneers Gregor Mendel (whose abbot, Mukherjee jokes, “didn’t mind giving peas a chance”) and Charles Darwin are given their due in crisp, detailed accounts of their work. “The essence of Darwin’s disruptive genius was his ability to think about nature not as fact -- but as process, as progression, as history,” Mukherjee writes. (TNS)