My love for Siddhartha Mukherjee is delayed. When people were talking about him (Emperor of All Maladies!), I didn't pick up the book - why would I want to read about cancer anyway? This year though, after a year of book drought, I was trawling across my house desperate for something to read. I had already started reading The Hand by Frank R Wilson, and was fascinated by much of the stuff he was talking about. I needed to run to the bathroom though, and it was nowhere to be found. (I only found it much later under layers of blankets on my bed). So I picked up the book at the top of my shelf - The Gene.
Mukherjee is, more than anything else, a storyteller. The book is tightly knit prose pretending to be non-fiction. The very beginning, his journey to Calcutta; the story of a monk; the middle, a complex plot of people, history and places putting together something resembling a murder mystery - except the mystery is about the fundamental make-up of the human material body. Consider this. His description of the relationship between James Watson and Francis Crick: "It was not an erotic love, but a love of shared madness, of conversations that were electric and boundless, of ambitions that ran beyond realities. (...) They were self-appointed jesters in a court of fools."
To talk about his way with writing people would be incomplete. His science writing is equally brilliant. There are a couple of pages where he describes the relationship between the genotype and the phenotype. Moving from genotype + environment = phenotype, he takes us through a range of experiments that lead us to a remarkable conclusion; that genotype + environment + triggers + chance (!!) = phenotype. Excuse me if I sound like I'm rambling about vague science-y things without context. But that's exactly the most exciting thing about Mukherjee.
He tells it like a story. Not just any story: a racy, murder mystery full of crazy characters racing through world wars, politics (both petty university politics and poisonous world politics), nobel prizes, love - to build a narrative about the Gene. Each step along the way is carefully constructed, taking into consideration every side of the debate - people in conversation with each other through academic papers, conferences, experiments, discipline; sometimes across time, sometimes within same universities and rooms; sometimes wilfully so, sometimes simply by accident.
Often, while reading the book, I told myself that this is the type of teacher I want to be. To weave together the most complex theoretical debates into such fascinating stories. Because at the end of the day, isn't that what it is?
Mukherjee is, more than anything else, a storyteller. The book is tightly knit prose pretending to be non-fiction. The very beginning, his journey to Calcutta; the story of a monk; the middle, a complex plot of people, history and places putting together something resembling a murder mystery - except the mystery is about the fundamental make-up of the human material body. Consider this. His description of the relationship between James Watson and Francis Crick: "It was not an erotic love, but a love of shared madness, of conversations that were electric and boundless, of ambitions that ran beyond realities. (...) They were self-appointed jesters in a court of fools."
To talk about his way with writing people would be incomplete. His science writing is equally brilliant. There are a couple of pages where he describes the relationship between the genotype and the phenotype. Moving from genotype + environment = phenotype, he takes us through a range of experiments that lead us to a remarkable conclusion; that genotype + environment + triggers + chance (!!) = phenotype. Excuse me if I sound like I'm rambling about vague science-y things without context. But that's exactly the most exciting thing about Mukherjee.
He tells it like a story. Not just any story: a racy, murder mystery full of crazy characters racing through world wars, politics (both petty university politics and poisonous world politics), nobel prizes, love - to build a narrative about the Gene. Each step along the way is carefully constructed, taking into consideration every side of the debate - people in conversation with each other through academic papers, conferences, experiments, discipline; sometimes across time, sometimes within same universities and rooms; sometimes wilfully so, sometimes simply by accident.
Often, while reading the book, I told myself that this is the type of teacher I want to be. To weave together the most complex theoretical debates into such fascinating stories. Because at the end of the day, isn't that what it is?
