I didn't realize it when I posted, but I looked back at Mukherjee's book The Gene: an Intimate History and realized that this article is an excerpt from two par

I didn't realize it when I posted, but I looked back at Mukherjee's book The Gene: an Intimate History and realized that this article is an excerpt from two parts of that book. Awhile ago I gave up on it a quarter of the way through, bogged down in an interminable section on fruit fly genetics, but have picked it up again now and am enjoying it. If you haven't read it yet, I recommend the book more for his personal narrative (the one that the article hones in on) than for the rehashing of Mendel or the Watson/Crick/Rosalind Franklin story, and in some ways it feels like a bit of a Frankenstein's monster a result of stitching together so many different stories. But he really is a beautiful writer. I'm starting to think of him as the successor to Oliver Sacks (RIP).