The Gene: An Intimate History

The Gene is what every introduction to genetics should be: rigorous, narrative, and morally serious. Mukherjee traces the concept of heredity from Mendels peas through Watson and Crick to the modern genome era — and asks what it means to edit the code of life now that we can.

The personal thread is what makes it land: Mukherjee uses his own family history of schizophrenia to ground abstract genetics in lived consequence. Read it before any conversation about polygenic scores, embryo selection, or germline editing.