I have been reading Siddhartha Mukherjee’s tour de force – The Gene – An Intimate History. It’s a difficult read, considering I have very little biology under my belt; however, Siddhartha has managed a difficult feat: he’s made the story of the gene an unputdownable one. His history of the gene is written in six parts: starting from 1865 till now. It traces the work of many minds that tried to understand the basic unit of all biological information. (Spoiler alert: I discuss the key points, so if you don’t need a nudge to read this book, stop right here)
Race: we’re quite the same, Sex and Gender: influenced by genes
The first fascinating thread is about race, sex and gender. Siddhartha takes time to make the case that humans are largely similar in genetic terms, and that we are much more like each other than unlike each other. The vast proportion of generic diversity occurs within races than between races. And that our mitochondrial lineage is from a single founding mother who existed in Africa about two hundred thousand years ago. He also discusses the ideas of sex and gender. How genes, more than any other force, influence our sex identity. And that children should be assigned their chromosomal sex regardless of anatomical variations and differences. He discusses the difference between sex identity and gender identity and acknowledges that human gender identity in the real world appears in a continuous spectrum.
Venter: audacious and persistent scientist
The second fascinating thread: a story about a biologist-engineer-entrepreneur called Venter. Venter’s entrepreneurial chutzpah leaps off the pages. He struggles to straddle the academic and commercial worlds and antagonizes both worlds. Venter uses a shortcut strategy for genome sequencing, starts The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), gets Hamilton Smith to work with him to sequence the pneumonia bacteria, puts out a 40-draft final paper (writing students, please note, not 3 drafts – 40 drafts!), forms yet another company Celera, which sequences the genome of the fruit fly, buys 200 sequencing machines to do shotgun sequencing, puts out a deadline four years ahead of his next competitor – the Human Genome Project, negotiates on his own terms with the government, and gets his Human Genome project paper published in the Science journal on Feb 16, 2001. The government supported Human Genome Project consortium, stung into action because of his earlier deadline projection, publishes their paper on Feb 15, 2001, in the Nature journal. Whew! (On a side note, the American system allows one to start and shut companies at a pace and acquire funding at a scale that we cannot yet fully imagine in India.)
Women in STEM: mostly invisible
The third fascinating thread: that women protagonists are just not there. They are mostly sidekicks. Consider this sequence of names as they appear in the book: Darwin, Mendel, De Vries, Bateson, Galton, Morgan, Fisher, Dobzhansky, Griffith, Muller, Avery, Wilkins, and then finally… Rosalind Franklin. Her photograph 51 was what made Wilkins realize that the structure of the DNA had to be a double helix. And yet, when Watson, Crick and Wilkins won the Nobel Prize for their discovery, she was not included in the prize. Part of it lay perhaps in the antagonism between Wilkins and Rosalind, partly because she was a great experimentalist but seemed to lack that bit of imagination to see the image that was forming in her experiments, but partly she was ignored. (The pattern repeats in Mukherjee’s other book - the Song of the Cell, where Jean Purdy does the crucial experiment for in-vitro fertilization. IVF was born in her hands. And yet, the paper by Edwards, Steptoe, and Bavister never acknowledged her work.)
And again, the names go thus: Beadle, Tatum, Pardee, Monod, Jacob, Lewis, Brenner, Kerr, Horvitz, Sulston, …Judith Kimble, Berg, Janet Mertz… And let’s see, Mertz’s work on recombinant DNA helped her adviser Berg get the Nobel prize in Chemistry along with Sanger and Gilbert. The Berg lab had a self-imposed moratorium on using cloning, but it left ‘others such as Cohen free to proceed full steam ahead later that year using my methods even though their experiments might have greater potential for being biohazardous’ (quote from Mertz in an interview by Chen, Duke University). In Mukherjee’s book, he describes how Cohen and Boyer met one night with Falkow post dinner and chatted about plasmids, gene chimeras and bacterial genetics. Over the course of the chat, they figured out a way to make chimeras entirely out of bacterial genes, which they considered far less hazardous. Boyer and Cohen later filed a patent to clone recombinant DNA. No Nobel prize, no patent for Janet…Should Janet have pushed Berg and others a little to not impose the moratorium? Or was she prescient about being cautious, and letting Frankenstein out of the bag? Only time will tell.
And then the story continues: Boyer, McKusick, Kravitz, Skolnick, Botstein, Davis, White, …Nancy Wexler, Mullis, Lander, Gilbert, Watson, Venter, Waterson, Hamer, Bouchard, Ebstein, Mary Lyon, Gurdon, Yamanaka, Szostak, and finally Jennifer Doudna, Emmanuelle Charpentier, Huang. Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier are the only ones mentioned who got a Nobel prize, working together to develop precise GENOME-editing technology (the CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors).
(To be fair, it’s not as if women are the only ones that are side-lined. Mendel is a classic case – he did a decade of work and wrote 44 pages, got 40 reprints and mailed them to scientists, and yet his work was lost to the world for nearly 40 years, till Bateson made it his personal mission to ensure that Mendel’s work was henceforth never ignored. Men rooting for men – my women comrades, please note)
Historical, yet personal narrative
The last, and not the least, is the gumption with which Siddhartha puts his own story out there and weaves it with the story of the human race, turning it from a series of events, into a passionate, personal search. It’s the reason I can no longer think of him as Mr. Mukherjee but as Siddhartha.
A wonderful, wonderful read. A must for any student of STEM.
P.S. And now that I’ve read it once like a story, I will go back and read it again, and get the bio terms under my belt.
Comentários