39 Books Like Genome

This book gripped me with a host of difficult questions and sorrowful insights into women’s health, racism, science, and medical systems in the USA. It reveals the impact of a previously unknown woman, Henrietta Lacks, who died in 1951, and whose cervical cancer cells were taken without her consent, and then, without any acknowledgement, used by researchers and laboratories to develop numerous treatments, drugs, and experiments.

It made me confront hard questions about class, race, gender, medical ethics, profit, and confidentiality. It is a brutal and detailed read, enhanced by the involvement of her family story, as they later discovered the theft and were to confront her immortality. A must-read by a plucky author. 

I love this book because it turns the most impactful science discovery of the 21st century–CRISPR gene editing–into a page-turner. Isaacson combines a biography of Jennifer Doudna, who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Emmanuelle Charpentier, with lucid accounts of the science and sequence of research breakthroughs that underlie CRISPR editing, as well as the intrigues and jockeying among powerful scientists and personalities vying for prizes and patents on the technology.

I came through this book to appreciate the enormous potential of CRISPR gene editing for good (curing hereditary diseases) and not-so-good (designer babies or, in the words of Vladimir Putin, “a soldier, an individual who can fight without fear or compassion, mercy or pain”). CRISPR promises to make human selection as important as natural selection in the evolution of many species, including humans.

This is one of those books that you have to read either alone or among tolerant friends, because every few pages you’ll be moved to read some bit of it aloud to everyone around you. Alondra Nelson is a brilliant sociologist of science and technology, and this book tells the story of how genetic science and racial politics intersect, sometimes in surprising ways. I love how this book intertwines cultural and political history with clear-eyed analysis of genomics, genealogy, and the life sciences—it’s a great example of how to write about the human stakes of scientific research and innovation.

More than thirty years ago, when I was conducting research on the psychology of altruism and moral development, a biologist recommended that I read The Selfish Gene. 

Reading Dawkins’ book caused me to change my theoretical orientation completely.  It enabled me to see that if I wanted to understand altruism and morality, I needed to understand how the genes that guide the construction of the mental mechanisms that cause us to help others evolved. 

Although the title of the book implies that we are selfish by nature, the contents explain how selfish genes can guide the development of unselfish animals.  

I love this book because Quammen looks at pandemics in terms of the changing relationships between humans and animals. A master of science writing, he explains how global economic and climate change is bringing us closer contact with many species in the wild—bats, parrots, chimpanzees—whose pathogens can “jump” to domestic animals (pigs and chickens). If you are worried about the bird flu, this is a great book to gain perspective on. 

James Watson was a clever, pushy, and critical young American molecular biologist exposed to the scientific culture of Britain in the early 1950s.

The book is full of acerbic comments about “stuffy” Cambridge dons and the rules of etiquette that young Jim struggled with, all the while scheming to maintain the various fellowships that allowed him to remain in the UK and pursue his ambition: to understand the chemical nature of the genetic material, DNA.

The book provides a lively account of his collaboration with an older Brit, the brilliant Francis Crick, who was also trying to unscramble DNA. Much of the technical stuff will be incomprehensible to most, but the method the two followed is clear. The partnership was hugely fruitful and the book is a lively account of how science actually works.

Watson and Crick tried everything while coping with competitors and their criticisms as well as their… show more.

This might not look like a big data book but, for me, the race to read the human genome marks the birth of big data in biology, in the form of a tsunami of DNA sequencing data. I edited Craig Venter’s A Life Decoded, the first genetic autobiography, which explored the implications of becoming the first person to gaze upon all six billion ‘letters’ of their own genetic code. While working on Craig’s extraordinary story I came across The Genome War and thought James Shreeve did a brilliant job in describing the drama, rivalry, and personalities in the race to sequence the very first human genomes between government-backed scientists and Celera, Craig’s company.

Once upon a time, we were unaware of DNA. We could tell that taller parents have taller kids, we could select tomato plants for sweeter fruit, and we could even construct plausible relationships between long-extinct animals and their descendants. Still, the nature of the stuff from which these links are made and how it works or fails to work remained a mystery.

Solving this mystery is one of humanity’s most remarkable achievements, and Mukherjee tells the tale with style and humor, weaving in recollections of his family’s encounters with mental illness. Despite my familiarity with the end result, the modern picture of genes, I found much of the history surprising and surprisingly colorful, full of dead ends and creative leaps. The last third of the book, on complex traits like intelligence and illnesses like schizophrenia, isn’t quite as good as the rest, but that takes us to our second… show more.

Paganini was an extraordinary violinist because of his exceptionally flexible thumb. Why was his thumb so “bendy”? Genetics. His genes provided an opportunity, and he learned how to exploit it.

Each of us is genetically unique. Our challenge is to understand our genes, which can be positive or negative. The Violinist’s Thumb is a nice introduction to the importance of DNA and the impact of genes in history. Inbreeding in the European royals led to hemophilia and ultimately contributed to the fall of the Czar and the Russian Empire. Genes have played a major role in history, art, and science.

It is a fun book with a novel perspective. 

The book is surprising not only because of the very strong amount of scientific data compiled showing that in terms of health and also various other traits, women do indeed often outperform men but also because it shows that many of the discoveries related to those scientific data were actually done by women, contrary to the false or at least biased stories we often read about, in the literature.

One of the strengths of the book is precisely how it talks about these untold stories in science and how it connects them to the main topic being discussed. I have this book assigned to my undergraduate biology course at Howard University.