In 2010,
Simon & Schuster published his book
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer detailing the evolution of diagnosis and treatment of human cancers from ancient Egypt to the latest developments in
chemotherapy and
targeted therapy. On 18 April 2011, the book won the annual
Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction; the citation called it "an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science." It was listed in the "All-
Time 100 Nonfiction Books" (the 100 most influential books of the last century) It was also listed in "The 10 Best Books of 2010" by
The New York Times and "Top 10 Books of 2010" by
O, The Oprah Magazine. In 2011, it was nominated as a
National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Based on the book,
Ken Burns made the
PBS documentary
Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies (2015). which was nominated for an
Emmy Award. He followed it with
The Gene: An Intimate History (2016). It is a history of
genetics from
Gregor Mendel to
Jennifer Doudna. It also delves into the personal genetic history of Mukherjee's family, including mental illness. The book discusses the power of genetics in determining people's health and attributes, but it also has a cautionary tone to not let genetic predispositions define fate, a mentality that led to the rise of
eugenics in history and something he thinks lacks the nuance required to understand something as complex as human beings.
Harriet Hall describes
Emperor and
The Gene as "the story of science itself".
The Gene was shortlisted for the
Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize 2016, "the Nobel Prize of science writing." The book was also the recipient of the 2017
Phi Beta Kappa Society Book Award in Science. Burns made a two-part PBS documentary,
The Gene: An Intimate History in 2020. In his book
The Song of the Cell, published in 2022, Mukherjee describes the history and medical mystery from the discovery of cell. Narrated in metaphors, many of which he created, such as "gunslinging sheriff" for antibody and "gumshoe detective" to
T cell, he tells the development of cell biology and how it became vital to modern medicine, from genetic engineering to immunotherapies.
Suzanne O'Sullivan, reviewing in
The Guardian, explains the book as a tool for "the reader to imagine they are an astronaut investigating the cell as if it is an unknown spacecraft".
Criticism and response In his 2016 article "Same but different" in
The New Yorker, Mukherjee attributed the most important genetic functions to
epigenetic factors (such as
histone modification and
DNA methylation). Giving an analogy of his mother and her twin sister, he explains:Chance events—injuries, infections, infatuations; the haunting trill of that particular nocturne—impinge on one twin and not on the other. Genes are turned on and off in response to these events, as epigenetic marks are gradually layered above genes, etching the genome with its own scars, calluses, and freckles.Mukherjee also claimed that understanding of epigenetics "would overturn fundamental principles of biology, including our understanding of evolution," as he said:Conceptually, a key element of
classical Darwinian evolution is that genes do not retain an organism's experiences in a permanently heritable manner.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, in the early nineteenth century, had supposed that when an antelope strained its neck to reach a tree its efforts were somehow passed down and its progeny evolved into giraffes.
Darwin discredited that
model. Giraffes, he proposed, arose through heritable variation and
natural selection—a tall-necked specimen appears in an ancestral tree-grazing animal, and, perhaps during a period of famine, this mutant survives and is naturally selected. But, if epigenetic information can be transmitted through sperm and eggs, an organism would seem to have a direct conduit to the heritable features of its progeny. Such a system would act as a wormhole for evolution—a shortcut through the glum cycles of mutation and natural selection... Lamarck is being rehabilitated into the new Darwin. "unleashed a torrent of criticism" from geneticists, as
The Guardian book review wrote. As David Hornby of the University of Sheffield put it: "all (scientific) hell broke loose! It seemed to some that the slumbering giant of Lamarck was about to gain a new audience." Mukherjee foresaw the reaction, as he noted: "These fantasies should invite skepticism." Omission of transcription factors was viewed as an "overarching" mistake, as Richard Mann at the Columbia University Medical Center remarked: "Only a talmudic-like reading can reveal a hint that something other than histone modifications are at play." and with an ability to influence
transcription factors. However, they contribute little to development. In response, Mukherjee did admit that omission of transcription factors "was an error" on his part. Phillip Ball, British science writer and editor of the journal
Nature, also agreed that Mukherjee certainly "got some things wrong". Writing in the
Prospect, he said, "Such claims [that some epigenetic changes can be inherited] are controversial—but even if they prove to be true, it seems highly unlikely that the effect will persist for many generations or will have long-term consequences for human evolution." Mukherjee did not say that epigenetic processes have established Lamarckism, as he noted in his article that "epigenetic scratch marks are rarely, if ever, carried forward across generations." Mukherjee also criticises the
IQ test as a measure of intelligence, and endorses the
theory of multiple intelligences (introduced by
Howard Gardner) over
general intelligence. He argues that the results of IQ tests for determining general intelligence do not represent intelligence in the real world. Reviewing the book in
The Spectator, Stuart Ritchie, a psychologist at the
University of Edinburgh, remarked that Gardner's theory is "debunked" and that "general intelligence is probably the most well-replicated phenomenon in all of psychological science." == Bibliography ==