Book, Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Gene: An Intimate History
The story of the gene from Mendel to gene therapy, told alongside the author's own family history. Paperback.
Reading
Genetics books worth reading
Two books on genes, heredity and gene editing. Neither one assumes you have a biology degree.
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The books
Book, Walter Isaacson
The Code Breaker
Jennifer Doudna and the discovery of CRISPR gene editing, from her lab to the ethics of editing human embryos. Paperback.
The Gene, by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Mukherjee follows the gene from Mendel's pea plants and Darwin through the structure of DNA, the Human Genome Project and the first attempts at gene therapy.
Beside that history runs his own family's, with mental illness across generations. Heredity stops being a diagram.
The Code Breaker, by Walter Isaacson
Isaacson follows Jennifer Doudna, who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for CRISPR gene editing, from her early lab work through the race to turn CRISPR against COVID-19.
Then comes the hard part. Should anyone edit a human embryo, and who gets to decide?