Siddhartha Mukherjee On Grandeur Of The Genes And It's Relationship With Mental Illness

In an elegant new book on genes, Siddhartha Mukherjee takes full measure of a family secret he has feared all his life, finds Aarathi Prasad

- Aarathi Prasad

The morning I met Siddhartha Mukherjee, he had run most of the way from his room at the magnificent St Pancras Renaissance Hotel as soon as he realised that his cab would not get the better of London’s rush-hour traffic. “You haven’t even broken a sweat,” I joke. “I have. I’m sweating,” he insists. But Mukherjee is impossibly calm and disarmingly kind, the qualities that likely marked him for success when he left Delhi for Oxford at age 17. He became a Rhodes Scholar and completed his PhD before going on to receive a medical degree at Harvard University. His first book, The Emperor of All Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 2011 and introduced us to a consummate word smith, one who can present cutting-edge science and complex ideas through a riveting narrative.

The physician and cancer researcher lives in New York with his wife, artist Sarah Sze, and their two young daughters, and family forms the emotional core of his new book, The Gene: An Intimate History. More than scientific or historical, this book is intimate. “The book covers so much ground,” says Mukherjee. “It ranges from my very personal history all the way to the future of the way we understand race and sexuality and gender. Every different chapter brought in a new surprise, like a change in the weather. There were chapters in the book where the weather turns wintry, there were chapters where it turns summery; there is humour, and then that goes away and is replaced by something very dark. Macabre, even.”