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The Intimate Gene

Siddhartha Mukherjee (2016) The Gene: An Intimate History. Scribner, New York, NY. ISBN: 978-1-47673-350-0, 608 pages, price: $32.00 (hardback)

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Notes

  1. Sidd for short, rather than Siddhartha, is more “comfortable,” as I learned from the author’s TV interview with Fareed Zakaria.

  2. The early Muller spelled his name Hermann but later he dropped one “n,” spelling his first name Herman. He was called Joe, according to his middle name.

  3. For example: J.G.ʼs family, plagued by repeated victims of Downʼs syndrome obviously carried a chromosomal rearrangement rather than a sporadic non-disjunction as do most Downʼs syndrome individuals (p. 267).

    “A mutation in any other chromosome [than the X- and Y-chromosome] can be repaired by copying the intact gene from the other chromosomeˮ (p. 359): Mutations in one strand are, as a rule, repaired by copying the complementary DNA-strand (of the same chromosome) rather than the homologous chromosome. This holds also for the X- and Y-chromosomes.

  4. A professional reader may miss the usual abundant detailed footnotes referring to the literature sites. This omission is a great relief to the lay reader. However, the references to the literature etc. do appear—at the end of the book. Notwithstanding, customary footnotes eventually do appear. It is not clear to me by what criteria are these footnotes different from the endnotes.

  5. Shortly before his death in 1911, Galton was interviewed by The Jewish Chronicle. Asked how he would define eugenics, he answered: “It’s the study of the conditions under human control which improve or impair the inborn characteristics of the race.” […]

    – What effect do you think persecution has had on the Jewish race?

    – So far as persecution weeds out those who are unfit so far it tends to evolve a race suited to meet hard conditions. [...]

    – Is it not rather immoral to look with satisfaction to persecution as an aid to race culture?

    – It is not immoral but unmoral—it has nothing to do with morals. Persecution does not always produce good results. [...]

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Genetics & Program of History and Philosophy of Science, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

    Raphael Falk

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  1. Raphael Falk
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Correspondence to Raphael Falk.

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The author declares that he has no conflict of interest.

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I wish to thank my colleagues Dita Atidia and Michael Brandeis for their helpful comments.

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Falk, R. The Intimate Gene. Sci & Educ 26, 411–415 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-017-9885-3

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