Ingenious: Siddhartha Mukherjee

The oncologist, researcher, and writer on genetics, medicine, and identity

By Michael Segal

Siddhartha Mukherjee feels his science deeply. As much as any contemporary science writer, he reminds us that the actors, subjects, and interpreters of science are human beings. His most recent book, The Gene: An Intimate History, is nominally about the modern science of genetics. “But of course,” he explains, “that book is about identity.” The identity of normal and abnormal, of fate and chance, and of the family — particularly Mukherjee’s own family, which has been plagued with hereditary mental illness.

Deeper still, it’s about how society sees itself. The gene, Mukherjee claims, is a destabilizing idea because of the extraordinary new powers it grants us over ourselves and each other. When does it break down, he wonders, and what happens when it does? “What happens when the idea of the gene becomes contorted into a mechanism to control identity? To control populations? As has happened, not just once, but several times in our history?”

In conversation, as in his writing, Mukherjee makes clear his passion for understanding not just science, but also its many contexts and points of intersection with the cultures that practice it. “What I care about the most,” he says, “is…