It was scarcely a moment from the first attempts to characterise heritable traits to the emergence of concerted efforts to put those understandings to work in engineering better people. Genetics is a new science – you can plausibly date it from the rediscovery around 1900 of Gregor Mendel’s then practically unknown 1866 paper on the breeding of peas, and the naming of the “gene” in 1909 as a discrete, stable, heritable unit – but its infiltrations into modern institutions and senses of the self are pervasive.
The intimacies of genetics reach beyond those of family and bedside scenes. Early on in his relationship with his wife-to-be, Mukherjee was compelled to tell her about madness in the family: “It was only fair to a future partner that I should come with a letter of warning.” Shared genetic inheritances were understood to define the family members’ past, their present and their fears about personal futures. In the new book, some of the cross-cut intimacies emerge from Mukherjee’s own Bengali family – a father with a genetically based brain pathology a mother whose identical twin displayed both the expected similarities with her sister and some surprising differences and, especially, the sudden appearance of schizophrenia in apparently healthy cousins and uncles, erupting from genetic legacies lying latent within. Cancer is increasingly a modern way of life, not just a way of death, and being a “cancer victim” and a “cancer survivor” both contribute to sufferers’ sense of who they are.īut not even cancer defines personal identity as powerfully as your genes are now thought to do. Modern cancer medicine is science, but its therapies are delivered at the bedside to patients, sometimes for many years. The earlier book includes stories about his own patients (Mukherjee was then an oncologist at Massachusetts general hospital, now he is a staff physician at Columbia University Medical Center in New York).
First, he repeats the cinematic cross-cutting of the personal and the scientific that structured his magnificent history of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies (2011). S iddhartha Mukherjee calls his history of genetics “intimate” for two reasons.
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