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- Biology books that will get under your skin
Photo by Ermak Oksana
I’ve been a reader all my life: as a child, some of my closest friends were novels and encyclopedias; at university I studied literature; as a young adult I became a journalist and steeped myself even further in the written word. Now, in middle age, I read hungrily and widely—fiction, non-fiction, across genres and topics—and average somewhere between 30 and 35 full reads each year.
About a decade ago I started keeping track of the books I’ve read, inspired partly by record keepers and list-makers like Art Garfunkel (who has kept a list of everything he’s read since 1968) and Austin Kleon (who is about the most dedicated list obsessive that I know) I realized that it would be helpful to be able to track what I read and when.
I say this because, off the back of Beyond Inheritance, I had planned to suggest a few other books about biology that I have read and would recommend. But scanning back over my reading history, I was surprised to see that there aren’t actually many other biology books on the list. The list isn’t everything I’ve read, of course: it only covers about a quarter of my adult life, and only books I have read completely, not the ones I have failed to finish, or the magazine articles, or the academic papers. But pure biology books? I realized I had to dig deeper into my memory to find some suggestions.
The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddartha Mukherjee (Scribner, 2010) is a book about cancer, one of the crucial flashpoints where many of us see genetics go haywire up close. This is a “biography” of the disease, tracing its history and the way we have thought about it, a kind of constantly evolving look at biology and society. I am legitimately jealous of Mukherjee, who seems to be a prodigious, otherworldly talent—not only a practicing physician, a hematologist and oncologist, but also a research biologist, a regular New Yorker contributor and author. This was his first book, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, the PEN prize for literary science writing, and the Guardian First Book Award. That’s not a bad start.
About a decade ago, Adam Rutherford, who I think is one of the best science communicators of our time, published A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived (Wiedenfeld & Nicolson/The Experiment, 2016.) It tells the story of human genetics by discussing the spread of homo sapiens, their traits and DNA. There are hundreds of thousands of years’ worth of yarns and conflicts and migration, all wrapped up in our genomes, and Rutherford’s passion for telling these stories comes bouncing off the page. Note: A tenth anniversary edition is just about to be released! (I also note that Mukherjee wrote the foreword. It’s a small world.)
I feel like any list about biology books must surely include Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Crown, 2011) the story of what happened to one woman’s DNA in a generations-long battle between biology and ethics. This title helped change public perception around issues of genetic ownership, and has rightly become a touchstone of sorts for a certain kind of science writing. Excellent stuff.
Finally, a qualified recommendation because I have a complicated relationship with the work of Walter Isaacson—a writer who has used what must be a mastery of personal politics and persuasion (given the people he has written about) to generate an increasingly formulaic conveyer belt of airport chonkers about “genius.” Still, there’s no denying the power and influence of some of the people he has covered, and there isn’t a better book about the work of Jennifer Doudna—a pioneer of the utterly revolutionary technology of genomic editing—than The Code Breaker (Simon & Schuster, 2021) Isaacson’s biography. The idea that we can edit and revise our genetic makeup is really fundamental to whatever comes next… and this book takes you inside at least a little of it.
Any other recommendations you’d want to share with Curious Reading Club members? If so, fire them over to [email protected]. I’ll be happy to pass them along.
Next Sunday is November 1, so we’re ramping up to announce our next book of the month—a fun and entertaining new read that had me gripped from start to finish. So look out for that!
Onwards
Bobbie