An intimate history of the gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee.

In 1859 Darwin published his famous book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. During the years before and after its publication, Gregor Mendel, a young Silesian monk, had been busy breeding peas and carefully logging his results. He was on the way towards a theory of heredity - to identifying the existence of genes.

Siddhartha Mukherjee is a cancer physician and researcher, a stem cell biologist and cancer geneticist. He is also author of The Emperor of All Maladies, a biography of cancer which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction, and the Guardian first book award.

He is assistant professor of Medicine at Columbia University.

Written by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Read by Raj Ghatak
Abridged and Produced by Jill Waters
A Waters Company production for BBC Radio 4. Show less