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skylar2 's review for:
The Gene: An Intimate History
by Siddhartha Mukherjee
While there's plenty of good information in this book, the writing is a mess (Mukherjee even admits in the acknowledgements that there was a single editor who read and edited the book in a single weekend). The epigenetics part is in particular a mess, with lots of hearsay but not a lot of real data. Mukherjee also commits the sin of only talking to the survivors; when discussing Rosalind Franklin, he uses Watson (and, to a lesser extent, Crick's) descriptions of her, her contributions, and her behavior and she comes off in a very unfavorable light, when I think anyone who knows the history of Franklin would be skeptical of that portrayal. In particular, Mukherjee did not discuss the fact that Franklin dealt with sexism in general and Watson's bigotry in particular when constructing his portrayal.
While more dated, if people want a more scientific/factual history of molecular biology, [a:Horace Freeland Judson's|133681|Horace Freeland Judson|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1305498404p2/133681.jpg] [b:The Eighth Day of Creation|228568|The Eighth Day of Creation|Horace Freeland Judson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1375675318l/228568._SX50_.jpg|221360] is much better, though still has a misportrayal of Franklin. Sadly, The Eighth Day of Creation was written in the 1970s and doesn't even cover PCR (though the appendices in the more recent editions mention it) let alone genomics.
While more dated, if people want a more scientific/factual history of molecular biology, [a:Horace Freeland Judson's|133681|Horace Freeland Judson|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1305498404p2/133681.jpg] [b:The Eighth Day of Creation|228568|The Eighth Day of Creation|Horace Freeland Judson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1375675318l/228568._SX50_.jpg|221360] is much better, though still has a misportrayal of Franklin. Sadly, The Eighth Day of Creation was written in the 1970s and doesn't even cover PCR (though the appendices in the more recent editions mention it) let alone genomics.