The #1 New York Times Bestseller. The basis for the Pbs Ken Burns Documentary The Gene- An Intimate History From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies-a fascinating history of the gene and a magisterial account of how human minds have laboriously, ingeniously picked apart what makes us tick (Elle). Sid Mukherjee has the uncanny ability to bring together science, history, and the future in a way that is understandable and riveting, guiding us through both time and the mystery of life itself. -Ken Burns""Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee dazzled readers with his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies in 2010. That achievement was evidently just a warm-up for his virtuoso performance in The Gene- An Intimate History, in which he braids science, history, and memoir into an epic with all the range and biblical thunder of Paradise Lost"" (The New York Times). In this biography Mukherjee brings to life the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices. ""Mukherjee expresses abstract intellectual ideas through emotional stories…(and) swaddles his medical rigor with rhapsodic tenderness, surprising vulnerability, and occasional flashes of pure poetry"" (The Washington Post).