About a year ago, I came across James Somers’ blog post, I should have loved biology. I began reading it and every sentence struck a chord: “I should have loved biology but found it a lifeless recitation of names”; “In textbooks, astonishing facts were presented without astonishment”; “In biology class, biology wasn’t presented as a quest for the secrets of life. The textbooks wrung out the questing.” In fact, the chord was so neatly stuck that I stopped reading about a quarter of the way through, and found myself falling into a memory. I was sitting in my 7th grade biology class, completely disinterested. Every time our teacher would turn her back to us to write on the blackboard, my friends and I would sling paper pellets at each other across the room, barely paying attention as she narrated wearily about cell walls or chloroplasts or mitochondria being the powerhouse of the cell. I liked math and physics and economics and even chemistry, to some extent (much less pellet slinging), but biology, with its endless memorization of definitions and regurgitation of facts – no, biology could go back under the soil it came from.

Now, I’m obsessed. I can’t get enough. I’ve read about fifteen books in the last year or so, watched countless YouTube videos, and started a bioinformatics course. And my list keeps growing. The first quarter of Somers’ post was so effective in making me consider my own disinterest-to-obsession journey – (I didn’t even read the rest until months later) – that I decided to look back and examine what caused this complete change of heart.

More than anything – nature documentaries, science shows, museum visits – it was great writing that allowed me to see the world of biology differently. My interest in biology, or rather the reversal of my disinterest in biology, began when I read The Sixth Extinction in 2016, during my second year of university. Elizabeth Kolbert’s gripping writing unveiled a completely different perspective of the subject, right alongside the scientists and researchers: driving through a Panamanian rainforest looking for golden frogs, searching a littered New Jersey creek for ammonites, scuba-diving in Castello Aragonese to inspect carbon dioxide rushing out of sea vents and in The Great Barrier Reef to look at octopi and coral reefs and blue starfish and leopard sharks and giant clams. Biology, suddenly, didn’t seem just a list of facts to memorize; it was an adventure.

I still remember how I felt after finishing her book: a strange mix of wonder and tragedy, awe and despair. That narrative structure – vivid reporting and meticulous research built on a foundation of context and history – changed how I saw science and scientists. No more dry paragraphs of definitions and explanations; every discovery had a story.

I wanted more books just like that, and luckily for me, several months later in an airport bookshop in Bangalore, I came across and picked up The Gene. I wasn’t aware of who Siddhartha Mukherjee was at the time (possibly the mention of Pulitzer Prize winner on the cover influenced me), and I had no prior interest in genetics, but that book would end up completely changing my worldview on biology and non-fiction writing. If Kolbert made a crack in the dam I had built around biology, Mukherjee would go on to smash the whole thing down to pieces.

One of the stories in the book, the discovery of the gene that caused Huntington’s disease, moved me tremendously when I first read it a few years ago. It’s the perfect example of the amount of effort that goes into a scientific discovery that then ends up as a single sentence in a textbook; in this case, that Huntington’s disease is a hereditary, neurodegenerative disorder caused by a mutation in a single gene.

The story of finding that mutation would make a thrilling movie: a young woman named Nancy Wexler, devastated by the news that her mother has been diagnosed with Huntignton’s and that she and her sister would have a 50-50 chance of getting it, decides to devote her life to solving this medical mystery. Her quest takes her from nursing homes in Los Angeles to interdisciplinary scientific workshops in Boston to stilt villages surrounding Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela. Her decade-long blood and skin sample collection efforts there would create the largest family tree with Huntington’s, leading to the first genetic test for the disease, followed by locating the precise genetic mutation that caused it.

The gene sequence had a strange repeating structure, CAGCAGCAG… continuing for 17 repeats on average (ranging between 10 to 35 normally), encoding a huge protein that’s found in neurons and testicular tissue (its exact function is still not well understood). The mutation that causes HD increases the number of repeats to more than forty – a “molecular stutter” – creating a longer huntingtin protein, which is believed to form abnormally sized clumps when enzymes in neural cells cut it. The more repeats there are, the sooner the symptoms occur and the higher the severity.

Nancy herself opted not to take the genetic test she helped create. “If the test showed I have the gene,” she wrote in 1991, “would I continue to feel the happiness, the passion, the occasional ecstasy I feel now? Is the chance of release from Huntington’s worth the risk of losing joy?”. In 2020, at the age of 74, she revealed that she had Huntington’s. The public acknowledgment was not a surprise for those close to her – for the last decade, they noticed her gait slowly deteriorate, speech slur, and limbs jerk in random directions, the same characteristics she saw in her mother half a century ago, and in the hundreds of Venezuelan patients she tended to ever since.

There’s still no cure for Huntington’s disease, but every time I hear about progress on cures, I feel a rush of emotions, like I have a personal stake in its invention. I really wish to see one found within Nancy Wexler’s lifetime; this movie deserves a happy ending.

Pick a field in biology, or a slice of history, and you’ll find countless stories just like this. Mischievous Watson and Crick figuring out the structure of DNA after getting a peek at Rosalind Franklin’s crisp x-ray crystallography photograph; Baruch Blumberg discovering hepatitis B after locating the antigen in the blood of an Australian Aboriginal, and beating NIH to its cure, the world’s first cancer vaccine; James Simpson systematically inhaling various vapors and recording its effects in the search for a better anesthetic, resulting in the discovery of chloroform; Andreas Vesalius taking prisoners’ corpses hanging in the gallows in 16th century Paris and, along with painter Andrea Mategna, publishing nearly 700 incredibly detailed drawings of the human anatomy.

History and stories may not be immediately applicable, but when used as a key ingredient it makes the discoveries more majestic, more impactful. That’s what I love about Mukherjee’s writing: it’s a unique stew of history, biography, experimental methods and results, scientific findings and their significance, seasoned well with personal anecdotes, and presented with the candor of a physician and the artistry of a poet. The context creates a kind of multiplier when the mind-shattering discoveries are explained – how a genotype gives rise to a phenotype, how cancer works, how a heart beats or a bone mends itself or a brain remembers a memory. Like the climax of a movie scene, the beauty and immensity of the discovery or the invention feels far more compelling after following the steps that got us there.

Every discovery might not have an entertaining backstory, but even when focusing on just the phenomenon, great technical writing has this striking ability to make you see the world differently. The same molecule or cell or organ, theory or experiment or discovery, suddenly seems monumental, like it’s the most important thing in the world. It makes you think: why didn’t I learn about this before?

One of my favourites is the way Mukherjee describes how a neuron communicates in The Song of the