THE GENE: An Intimate History

In search of fabric

St. Charles, Missouri

Remember  Rocky?  Of course you do; it was a great movie.  No matter what you think of boxing, Philadelphia, or Sylvester Stallone, Rocky was great.  Do you remember Rocky 2?  Probably not.  It wasn’t bad, really, but it just wasn’t up to the standards of its predecessor.  That seems to be generally the case; sequels are, to some extent, a letdown.

Of course, there are exceptions: The Godfather was one of the best movies of all time – but Godfather 2 was just as good.

Well, sadly, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s new book, The Gene: an Intimate History falls into the Rocky category; compared to his previous triumph, The Emperor of All Maladies, The Gene is over-long,  over-written, and difficult to follow – in fact, soporific.  (My open-the-book to nap interval was about seven minutes, a  record.)  I wish I could praise Mukherjee’s new book, because he is an indisputably brilliant scholar.  I think that winning the Pulitzer Prize with Emperor has made him secretly long to be a poet.  Instead, I hope he goes back to being a fill-time cancer researcher; then, in 20 years, he can write  the Godfather of modern medical  literature.

As to the structure of the book:  He begins with the history of research in genetics – all the way back to Mendel, for Heaven’s sake!  This story has been told before, usually more simply.  There is quite an extensive (and interesting) discussion of eugenics, Nazi and otherwise.  The bulk of the book deals with modern developments in genetic medicine, and is quite up-to-date; even CRISPR Cas9 technology is explained, and rather well at that.  The final few chapters, though, degenerate into medical metaphysics.  I got through them, with the help of much coffee.  I may try them again someday, but not soon.

In short: don’t read this book unless you are an expert in the field, an insomniac or, like me, a masochist.