"Our capacity to
understand and manipulate human genomes alters our conception of what it means
to be “human”"
In this timely book, Dr. Mukherjee gives us a window into
his insightful mind as he contemplates the past and future societal impacts
that go along with what has and what will be discovered about genes and
inheritance. Instead of bringing genetics down to a simple level, he pulls the reader
into the complex story of genetics so they can appreciate both its potential
and its uncertainties.
From reading the synopsis and prologue, I was expecting his
family and genetics of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia to be more central to
the book but I was not disappointed to discover that this book was so much more
than that. Mukherjee does sprinkle in examples from his family to illustrate
some of the peculiar ways inheritance works. However as the title of the book
suggests, this is a history book about the discovery of genes and inheritance,
and for this purpose it makes sense that Mukherjee’s family only plays a minor
role.
I found the history of genetics so fascinating that for me
it could have stood alone without the personal bits about his own family. But
then again, I already have a personal interest in the subject matter. For
others, I can see how this might hook them in. The nice thing about the story
of his family in the prologue is that it not only gives us the background we
need to take in those personal insights that come from Mukherjee reflecting on his
family but it also lets us get to know the author. You feel you are listening
to a friend as Mukherjee brings forth his family history of mental illness
while describing a trip to India with his dad to visit his cousin in a
psychiatric facility.
This history, The Gene,
is full of stories about scientists who had important questions about life like,
How do you make a human? What makes each human different? Can we make humans
better? It is a rich story full of interconnected characters, the personalities
of scientists who played their part in moving our knowledge of heredity forward.
For example, Watson and Crick built models and had mad conversations, while
Rosalind Franklin’s meticulous work provided a crucial part of the discovery of
the double helix.
"Franklin was frankly
exasperated at the “adolescent blather”. The boys and their toys had turned out
to be a monumental waste of her time."
Mukherjee brings the scientists to life, so that you can see
them as regular people that are driven by their passions and also influenced by
other events going on in their time and place. For Mendel, the pea breeding monk,
his determination was driven by a frustration over the lack of organizing principles
in biology at the time. He wondered why life is organized the way it is, with
all its different branches. How did like beget like and why couldn’t elephants
morph into pigs?
We learn that Bateson, a supporter of Mendels work who coined
the term genetics predicted, “One thing is for certain: mankind will begin to
interfere”. The book takes you down the slippery slope the Nazis slid down with
eugenics and forces us to think critically about the modern ways we
strive to improve genetics by genetic testing and embryo selection. How do we
create boundaries about when to intervene? What is abnormal or what is
extraordinary suffering?
I think readers will appreciate seeing scientists struggle
to solve problems rather than being suddenly struck with a brilliant insight like
the old apple on Newton’s head. We frustratingly see Darwin struggle with
missing pieces of evidence for his theory of evolution, while Mendel’s work, had
he known about it, could have given him the exact bits he needed. Instead the significance
of Mendels work and the connection between its units of heredity and evolution
were not realized until 40 years after it was published.
Mukherjee shows other such crosslinks that occur between
seemingly unrelated disciplines that seem to spur knowledge and technology on
in leaps and bounds. Sometimes through timely collaborations, researchers
studying human genes were able to get a hold of that exact tool they needed to
solve the problem they were stuck on. Human
genes were frustratingly inaccessible for study at first, but solutions came
from bacterial research when it was discovered they could use bacterial enzymes
that cut DNA at specific sequences to extract out DNA sequences and shuttle
them into bacteria to make copies.
Throughout the book he is able to share his uncertainties about
how the knowledge of human genetics will shape his future and all of our futures,
not like a lecturer but like a friend talking to a friend who may not be an assistant professor of
medicine at Columbia University nor have graduated from Stanford, Oxford and
Harvard, as this author has. Mukherjee shares his uncertainties while bringing readers on a most
entertaining tour of genetics from past enlightenments to gene editing
technologies that are poised to shape our genetic future. If the intent of the book
was to help readers of varied backgrounds think deeply about the impact of
genetics and our knowledge of it, I believe he has succeeded in this book.
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