Popular science books on genes, cells and life: eight for curious adults

The best popular science books on genetics do two jobs at once. They explain a mechanism you cannot see, and they tell you why the people who worked it out cared so much. The eight below cover heredity and evolution, the gene-editing revolution, and the cell and its strange relatives. If you only read one, make it Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Gene (Amazon (book)), which runs from a monk's pea plants to CRISPR in a single narrative.

None of them needs a science degree. A few demand patience. I have grouped them by the question they answer, with a quick guide first for anyone in a hurry.

Heredity, evolution and the gene

The Gene (Amazon (book)), Siddhartha Mukherjee. Mukherjee, an oncologist, starts with Gregor Mendel counting peas in a monastery garden in Brno and ends with the first experiments in editing human cells. Between those points come Darwin, the eugenics movement and its crimes, the double helix, the Human Genome Project and gene therapy's early disasters. Running through it is his own family's history of mental illness, which keeps the abstract question of inheritance uncomfortably personal. It is long and sometimes ornate, and specialists have quibbled with some simplifications, but it is the most complete single account of the field written for a general reader.

The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins. It was first published in 1976, fifty years before this list, and it is still the book that taught a generation to look at evolution from the gene's point of view. Bodies, in Dawkins's framing, are vehicles that genes build to get themselves copied. That idea explains a surprising amount, from why animals help their relatives to why cooperation can evolve between strangers. The title has been misread for half a century: genes are not selfish in any emotional sense, and the book is partly about how altruism arises (it also coined the word "meme"). Some biologists think it overstates the gene-centred view at the expense of selection acting on groups and organisms, so read it as a powerful lens rather than the last word.

The Violinist's Thumb, Sam Kean. Kean builds each chapter around a story, starting with the violinist of the title, Niccolo Paganini, whose unusually flexible hands may have come from an inherited disorder of connective tissue. From there the book wanders through the discovery of DNA, the race to sequence the human genome, our Neanderthal inheritance and the remains of ancient viruses stitched into our chromosomes. It is the lightest book here and the best for a reader who wants to be entertained first and educated second. The trade-off is depth: you get a great many vivid episodes and less of the connecting theory.

If the basic arithmetic of inheritance is hazy, it helps to have it in hand before tackling any of these. Our Punnett square calculator lets you cross two parents and watch Mendel's ratios fall out, which makes the early chapters of The Gene considerably easier going.

Editing the code: CRISPR and its consequences

The next two books are best read as a pair, because they tell the same story from different distances.

The Code Breaker (Amazon (book)), Walter Isaacson. Isaacson, who has written biographies of Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci, follows Jennifer Doudna from a childhood in Hawaii to the 2012 paper, written with Emmanuelle Charpentier and their teams, that turned a bacterial immune system into a programmable tool for cutting DNA. The book covers the scientific race and patent fight with the Broad Institute, the 2018 announcement of gene-edited babies in China, and Doudna's turn to COVID-19 testing in 2020. It is brisk, well reported and built for a general audience. Critics have noted that it frames a collective scientific achievement around one heroine; keep that in mind when other names drift to the margins.

A Crack in Creation, Jennifer Doudna and Samuel Sternberg. The first half is Doudna's own account of how CRISPR became a gene-editing method; the second is an argument about what should and should not be done with it, especially edits to embryos that would pass to future generations. It came out in 2017, a year before the gene-edited twins were announced, so its warnings about germline editing now read less like speculation and more like a forecast. The science is explained carefully, and the authors are frank about their own unease. Readers who want the insider's perspective will prefer it to Isaacson's; readers who want a page-turner may find it more measured.

What happens when you combine CRISPR with a trick for beating the normal rules of inheritance is a question both books touch on and neither can settle. I took it up at length in gene drives: the case for caution and the case for trying, and the same arguments about consent and control run through our explainer on whether GMOs are good or bad.

Cells, bodies and other kinds of life

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Amazon (book)), Rebecca Skloot. In 1951 doctors at Johns Hopkins took a sample of a tumour from Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman from a tobacco-farming family in Virginia, without her knowledge. Her cells, known as HeLa, became the first human cells to grow indefinitely in a laboratory and went on to underpin decades of research, including work on the polio vaccine. Skloot spent years with Lacks's children, who learned about the cells long after the fact, and the book is as much about them as about the biology. It is the best book here on consent, race and who profits from bodies, and it is widely taught. A postscript the book could not include: in 2023 the family reached a settlement with a biotechnology company over its use of the cells.

The Song of the Cell, Siddhartha Mukherjee. Mukherjee's follow-up to The Gene turns from information to architecture. It begins with the first microscopists peering at cork and pond water and moves through the discovery that every living thing is made of cells, then into blood, immunity, nerves, fertilisation and the newer medicine of engineered immune cells and stem cell transplants. Patient stories carry the science, as they do in his earlier books. It overlaps a little with The Gene and works fine on its own, though it suits readers who already have some appetite for clinical detail.

Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake. A book about fungi, which are neither plants nor animals and turn out to run a large share of life on land. Sheldrake, a biologist who studied fungal networks in tropical forests, covers lichens, yeasts, the mycorrhizal partnerships between fungi and plant roots, mushrooms that alter minds and fungi that digest pollutants. It is the most lyrical book on this list and a good corrective to the animal-centred view of biology the others share. One caution: since it appeared, some forest ecologists have argued that the popular idea of trees sharing resources through a "wood wide web" has run ahead of the field evidence. Sheldrake's own treatment is more hedged than the version that went viral, but it is worth reading with that debate in mind.

Reading order, if you want one

For a single arc through the subject, try this: The Violinist's Thumb to get comfortable, The Gene for the full history, The Code Breaker for the modern chapter, and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks for the human cost that the triumphal histories tend to skim. Add The Selfish Gene whenever you want to argue with someone. Keep Entangled Life for last, as a reminder that most of life does not look like us.

A gap worth naming: none of these books is about agricultural biotechnology, which is where gene editing will reach most people first, through crops and food rather than clinics. For a sense of how strange the engineering can get at the bacterial end, our look back at Synthia and the synthetic cell picks up where these books stop.

How we chose

These books were picked for how clearly they explain the science to a general reader, for a spread of viewpoints from evolutionary theory to medical ethics, and for how widely they are read and reviewed. Book links go to Amazon.