Siddhartha Mukherjee

Born on 21 July 1970, Siddhartha Mukherjee is an Indian-American physician, biologist, and oncologist whose career placed him at the intersection of clinical medicine and life science. His own family history — which included mental illness across generations — made the question of heredity not merely scientific but personal. That combination of professional formation and lived experience drew him towards the project of writing a full account of the gene: what it is, where the idea came from, and what it has meant for how human beings understand themselves.

The Gene: An Intimate History, published by Scribner on 17 May 2016, traces genetic research from Aristotle's earliest thinking about inheritance through the discoveries of Crick, Watson, and Rosalind Franklin to the scientists who mapped the human genome in the 21st century. Mukherjee examines how genes shape health, behaviour, and identity, threading his family's experience through the larger scientific narrative. The book also functions as a caution against genetic determinism, arguing that the belief that predisposition equals destiny was the logic that, historically, gave rise to eugenics.

Mukherjee continues to practise as an oncologist while working as an author and biologist. The Gene stands as a record of how the science of heredity developed over two millennia, and as a personal argument: that living with genetic risk is not the same as being defined by it. That argument — made from within a family that carries such risk and a career spent treating diseases that genetics shapes — is where his work continues to matter.