35 books like Genome

Only dogged research could unearth the story of how one Black woman’s death – and the harvesting of her cells – could change the course of medical research.

It is a story of how some innocuous biological matter could grow into a hothouse of excess. Pharma companies enriched themselves reproducing the cells of Henrietta Lacks but did little or nothing for the family who lost their matriarch.  

For me, this book unleashed the idea of shaping deep research into a story can change our view of society.

I have seldom read a book with as much zeal as The Code Breaker, written by the famous biographer and historian, Walter Isaacson, whom I’d met on the CRISPR conference circuit.

Isaacson focuses on Doudna’s life and science, but also introduces the reader to a large cast of characters, including Doudna’s former colleague and fellow Nobelist, Emmanuelle Charpentier. He even has a crack at running a CRISPR experiment himself.

The success of this book has likely done more than anything to educate the public on the transformative promise of CRISPR.

This is one of those books that you have to read either alone or among tolerant friends, because every few pages you’ll be moved to read some bit of it aloud to everyone around you. Alondra Nelson is a brilliant sociologist of science and technology, and this book tells the story of how genetic science and racial politics intersect, sometimes in surprising ways. I love how this book intertwines cultural and political history with clear-eyed analysis of genomics, genealogy, and the life sciences—it’s a great example of how to write about the human stakes of scientific research and innovation.

More than thirty years ago, when I was conducting research on the psychology of altruism and moral development, a biologist recommended that I read The Selfish Gene. 

Reading Dawkins’ book caused me to change my theoretical orientation completely.  It enabled me to see that if I wanted to understand altruism and morality, I needed to understand how the genes that guide the construction of the mental mechanisms that cause us to help others evolved. 

Although the title of the book implies that we are selfish by nature, the contents explain how selfish genes can guide the development of unselfish animals.  

This book is less about who we are than how we relate to nature. It is important for all of us to be reminded periodically that humans are only actors in a much larger and more powerful environment that operates beyond our control. Many books have been written in the past 50 years about the next pandemic, and David Quammen’s account of how diseases spread from animals to humans is one of the best. For me, it puts the daily feed of political bickering and distant violence in a refreshing perspective, mixed with a level of invigorating nervousness. 

Experiences with HIV and SARS should have taught us how vulnerable we are to new diseases. The 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, which killed over 14,000 people, demonstrated how irrational and self-destructive we can behave when fear takes grip. Why, then, were we so unprepared, either medically or psychologically, to face… show more.

James Watson was a clever, pushy, and critical young American molecular biologist exposed to the scientific culture of Britain in the early 1950s.

The book is full of acerbic comments about “stuffy” Cambridge dons and the rules of etiquette that young Jim struggled with, all the while scheming to maintain the various fellowships that allowed him to remain in the UK and pursue his ambition: to understand the chemical nature of the genetic material, DNA.

The book provides a lively account of his collaboration with an older Brit, the brilliant Francis Crick, who was also trying to unscramble DNA. Much of the technical stuff will be incomprehensible to most, but the method the two followed is clear. The partnership was hugely fruitful and the book is a lively account of how science actually works.

Watson and Crick tried everything while coping with competitors and their criticisms as well as their… show more.

This might not look like a big data book but, for me, the race to read the human genome marks the birth of big data in biology, in the form of a tsunami of DNA sequencing data. I edited Craig Venter’s A Life Decoded, the first genetic autobiography, which explored the implications of becoming the first person to gaze upon all six billion ‘letters’ of their own genetic code. While working on Craig’s extraordinary story I came across The Genome War and thought James Shreeve did a brilliant job in describing the drama, rivalry, and personalities in the race to sequence the very first human genomes between government-backed scientists and Celera, Craig’s company.

I love to discuss this book with my students; this is a more recent (relative to the others) retelling of the story, with more details fleshed out through decades of scholarship in the area.

The author tells stories about his family and relates this to the discovery of the physical basis of heredity. This book was the inspiration for a Ken Burns series on PBS.

There is no better book that combines the worlds of science and sports than The Sports Gene by David Epstein.

This book takes you all around the world to explore the physical and mental traits of diverse athletes with the goal of understanding how much of athletic prowess is written in our genetic code. The results are surprising and will flip a lot of your preconceived notions about nature and nurture.

I read it years ago but still talk to my students every semester about why, year in and year out, the best distance runners in the world seem to keep coming from the same little pocket of Kenya.

At the end of the day, we are humans because of our DNA and Sam Kean breaks down that DNA in a way that is surprisingly page-turning.

You will learn more about your genetic code than you ever thought possible. Who would have thought that there is more viral DNA in the human genome than actual human genes!

The Violinist’s Thumb is a ride that weaves the biology of DNA and the cultural and societal impacts of the molecular revolution into a compelling story you won’t want to put down.