I finished reading Siddhartha Mukherjee’s book from 2016, “The Gene: An Intimate History”, a dense, engaging book, written in a prose style, conversational, thorough, accessible and personal, exceedingly rare qualities to find in a book covering such technical topic. Mukherjee, trained and worked as an oncologist, won the Pulitzer Prize for his earlier book on cancer, “The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer”. He is currently an associate professor of medicine at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University. Understood to be the ‘best’, or most complete and thorough history of genetics, our understanding of it and the ethical questions of its increasingly influential applications in medicine, society and evolution. Of such broad scope in the changing landscape of medicine and its science, it has expectedly, become subject to an array of criticisms. The practice of science is not perfect. Our understanding is forever evolving and as much as promoters might insist that theirs is solid and fixed, our knowledge will always be imperfect. We circle around a topic, defining it closer and closer, but never quite understanding it fully, questions leading us to more questions, our knowledge shaped by what we already ‘know’, and very occasionally propose entirely new ways of explaining, new theories, that dislodge previous established theory. Continue reading →