Book review of 'The Gene: an Intimate History', authored by Siddartha Mukherjee

1. The Gene
Reviewed by SoonJye Kho (6/26/2017)

2. “likeness”
530 BC, Pythagoras
- Hereditary information was carried in male semen
- Father provides all the nature, mother provides the nurture
Aristotle
- Challenged Pythagoras’ theorem: If father’s sperm provides information, how
does a sperm contain information to produce a daughter’s female genital?
- He thinks that both parents provide information for an offspring
‘Information’, passed from parents to offspring

3. Theory of Evolution
1809, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
- inheritance of acquired characteristics
- Evolution was adaptation
- God creates life, but life still had a chance to perfect
their form
1858, Charles Darwin
- Survival of the fittest
- Traits that ensure survival passed down to offspring
- Do not acknowledge the God’s creation

4. Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882)
Wide blank:
- How variants arise in the nature to begin with
- How parents could transmit traits to the offspring, fixing the
traits over generation
Pangenesis (genesis from everything)
- Hereditary information is stored in respective body part
- Male and female semen blends together, passing traits to
offspring from both parents
- Couldn’t explain how a trait is fixed.
A good trait: 100% → 50% → 25% → 12.5% →…

5. Gregor Mendel (1822 - 1884)

6. His work was not appreciated and acknowledged
until year 1900
(Biology is more concern on morphology than
numeric back then)
Gregor Mendel (1822 - 1884)

7. Francis Galton (1822 - 1911)
Eugenics
- Manipulate heredity to create a “fitter society”
Positive: encourage marriage between people with desired
traits (intelligent, tall, beautiful, superior)
Negative: prevent marriage of people with undesired traits
(short, poor, ugly, dull, inferior)

8. Eugenics (racist hygiene)
Holocaust
USA (1907): laws was passed that allow
compulsory sterilization of patients in
mental institution
Most notably Carrie Buck’s case

9. Hereditary information
Encoded in where?
- gene
What is gene???

10. Frederick Griffith (1879 - 1941)
Genetic information passed between two strains, 1928
Gene = some molecules that could exist outside the cell

11. Gene = biochemical molecules reside in cell
Nucleic acid:
- The components are made of sugar,
phosphate, and bases (A,T,C,G)
In 1950s, its structure were solved by James D.
Watson, Francis Crick, Rosalind Franklin, and
Maurice Wilkins

12. Gene anatomy
What is gene?
- Biochemical molecules with a regular structure
What does gene do?
- Encodes hereditary information
How??

13. George Beadle (1903 - 1989)
Discovered the role of genes in regulating biochemical events
within cells in 1958 (nobel prize laureate)
- One gene one enzyme hypothesis

14. Central dogma
Gene
RNA
Protein
Encodes message
Builds
Regulates
Regulation. That’s when scientists recognize the complexity of gene physiology,
that creates a complex organism.
How does gene govern embryogenesis?

15. Delphic boat, Antoine Danchin
Given a boat, one plank is being replaced in each time of maintenance
Is the boat still the same boat after all the planks have been replaced?
- It is, a boat is a boat not because of the planks, because of the relationship of
planks

16. Language of genes
1955 - Protein Sequencing (insulin)
1977 - DNA sequencing
RNA splicing
- introduction of the concept of intron and
exon
Comparison of altered genes with normal genes,
explaining mechanisms of how diseases occur
- E.g. haemophilia

17. Recombinant DNA
Bioethics, Biosafety
Manufacture insulin via bacteria in large scale
Factor VIII - blood clotting factor that is administered to the hemophiliacs (1987)
- Patients get the factor from blood transfusion
- 1982, AIDS virus spread violently
- 90% of patients were infected with HIV virus
HGH, TPA, vaccines

18. Gene Mapping
DNA sequencing, maximum length is 5,386 bases
(human genome 3.2bil)
1983 - huntington’s disease
1989 - cystic fibrosis
Human Genome Project, completed in year 2003

19. Population Genetic
Species age:
- Human species are younger than
chimpanzee
Trace population lineages
Maternal lineage:
- Via mitochondrial genome
- Each of us has one common mother
(mitrochondrial Eve)

20. Nature vs Nurture
- Height
- Intelligence
- Behaviour (Criminality, addiction, violence)
- Personality (Risk taker, active, quiet)
- Gender identity
- Sexual preference
- Temperatement
- Polygenic disease (hypertension, cancer, coronary artery disease)

21. Review
New perspective, new idea
- Moves scientific field forward
Influence of genetic over the course of human history
Complexity of genetic
- Interaction with environmental factor increased complexity