The Gene: An Intimate History - by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Another great one I forgot to add to the blog last year.
from NYT review;

Heredity was the “missing science,” the ever prescient H.G. Wells remarked at the turn of the century: “This unworked mine of knowledge on the borderland of biology and anthropology, which for all practical purposes is as unworked now as it was in the days of Plato, is, in simple truth, 10 times more important to humanity than all the chemistry and physics, all the technical and industrial science that ever has been or ever will be discovered.”

This missing science we now know as genetics. Its elusive fundamental particle, the essential unit of biological information, we call the gene. First the idea of the gene had to be invented. Then the physical entity, present in each cell of our bodies, in every living thing, had to be discovered. The story of this invention and this discovery has been told, piecemeal, in different ways, but never before with the scope and grandeur that Siddhartha Mukherjee brings to his new history, “The Gene.” He fully justifies the claim that it is “one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in the history of science.”