The Gene: An Intimate History

　　1856年，在摩拉維亞一處偏僻的奧古斯丁修道院，有位修士偶然發現了遺傳這門學問。遺傳與達爾文的演化論相關，並在1940年代與納粹恐怖的優生主義擦撞出可怕的火花。在戰後，基因遺傳成為生物學，改寫了我們對於性慾、氣質、選擇與自由意志的理解。

　　這本書描寫的正是一群人類智慧的故事，從達爾文、孟德爾到弗朗西斯．克里克、詹姆斯．沃森、羅莎琳．富蘭克林，以及數千位現今仍在解碼人體最奧妙密碼的科學家。

　　《The Gene》是一部史詩巨作，描寫科學理念如何在現實生活中成真。在氣勢滂礡的寫作野心中，《The Gene》讓我們藉著人類最微小的基因單位，一窺人類過去與未來的願景。

　　The Gene is the story of one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in our history,
from bestselling, prize-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee.

　　Spanning the globe and several centuries, The Gene is the story of the quest to decipher the master-code that makes and defines humans, that governs our form and function.

　　The story of the gene begins in an obscure Augustinian abbey in Moravia in 1856 where a monk stumbles on the idea of a ‘unit of heredity’. It intersects with Darwin’s theory of evolution, and collides with the horrors of Nazi eugenics in the 1940s. The gene transforms post-war biology. It reorganizes our understanding of sexuality, temperament, choice and free will. This is a story driven by human ingenuity and obsessive minds – from Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel to Francis Crick, James Watson and Rosalind Franklin, and the thousands of scientists still working to understand the code of codes.

　　This is an epic, moving history of a scientific idea coming to life, by the author of The Emperor of All Maladies. But woven through The Gene, like a red line, is also an intimate history – the story of Mukherjee’s own family and its recurring pattern of mental illness, reminding us that genetics is vitally relevant to everyday lives. These concerns reverberate even more urgently today as we learn to “read” and “write” the human genome – unleashing the potential to change the fates and identities of our children.

　　Majestic in its ambition, and unflinching in its honesty, The Gene gives us a definitive account of the fundamental unit of heredity – and a vision of both humanity’s past and future.

作者簡介

辛達塔．穆克吉 Siddhartha Mukherjee

　　哥倫比亞大學醫學中心癌症醫師、哥倫比亞大學醫學院副教授。畢業於史丹福大學、牛津大學和哈佛醫學院。他的文章散見於《自然》（Nature）、《新英格蘭醫學期刊》（The New England Journal of Medicine）、《紐約時報雜誌》（The New York Times Magazine）和《新共和》（The New Republic）等刊物。他偕妻女定居於紐約。

　　《萬病之王The Emperor of All Maladies》獲得多項大獎肯定，包括紐約時報年度好書、普立茲獎非文學類得主以及英國衛報新人獎等。

　　Siddhartha Mukherjee is a cancer physician and researcher, a stem cell biologist and a cancer geneticist. He is the author of The Laws of Medicine and The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction and the Guardian First Book Award.

　　Mukherjee is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University. A Rhodes Scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School. His laboratory has identified genes that regulate stem cells, and his team is internationally recognized for its discovery of skeletal stem cells and genetic alterations in blood cancers.

　　He has published work in Nature, Cell, Neuron, The New England Journal of Medicine, the New York Times and several other magazine and journals. He lives with his family in New York City.

　　www.siddharthamukherjee.me/