The Gene

Siddhartha Mukherjee's 2016 history of the gene, from Aristotle's theory of inheritance through the discovery of DNA, the Human Genome Project, and the CRISPR revolution. Mukherjee, a Columbia oncologist who earlier won the Pulitzer for The Emperor of All Maladies, interweaves the scientific narrative with his own family's history of mental illness. The book is both a technical history — Mendel, Morgan, Watson and Crick, the race to sequence the human genome — and a meditation on what it means when the code of life becomes readable and editable.

Gates called Mukherjee "a talented writer and doctor [who] guides us through the past, present, and future of genome science." For a founder in biotech, healthcare, or any business that touches human biology, this is the essential primer on how we got here — the intellectual history behind every company working on gene therapy, CRISPR diagnostics, or personalised medicine.

Mukherjee's framing of the gene as both a scientific object and a cultural weapon — the same knowledge that produced the Human Genome Project also produced eugenics — is directly relevant to a founder navigating the ethics of what they build. The book forces the question that every biotech founder will face: just because you can edit a gene does not mean you should, and the history of genetics is full of people who assumed the technical question and the moral question were the same.