A fascinating and often sobering history of how humans came to understand the roles of genes in making us who we are. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies, a fascinating history of the gene and a magisterial account of how human minds have laboriously, ingeniously picked apart what makes us tick. This is perhaps the greatest detective story ever told a millennia-long search, led by a thousand explorers, from Aristotle to Mendel to Francis Collins, for the question marks at the center of every living cell.

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