For anyone who has had the great pleasure of reading Siddhartha Mukherjee’s 2011 Pulitzer Prize winning “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,” expect something very special when Dr. Mukherjee’s next book, ” The Gene: An Intimate History,” is published in the Spring. Writing in the March 28, 2016 edition of The New Yorker, Mukherjee goes with his father to see his cousin, Moni, 52, who has been confined to a Calcutta “lunatic home” since 2004. Awash in antipsychotics and sedatives, his father reveals that he has never accepted his eldest brother’s son diagnosis of schizophrenia. What the visit reveals, more importantly, is that there is more than just familial concern to these visits.

“Moni is not the only member of the family with mental illness,” Mukherjee writes. “Two of my father’s four brothers suffered from various unravellings of the mind. Madness has been among the Mukherjees for generations, and at least part of my father’s reluctance to accept Moni’s diagnosis lies in a grim suspicion that something of the illness may be buried, like toxic waste, in himself.” It seems his father’s third-born brother and most promising of the “Mukherjee boys” went off to college with loads of promise only to die of pneumonia in what the author now recognizes quite clearly was a result of the effects of acute bipolar mania. Another Mukherjee brother, Ragu, is lost to the protective guardianship of a grandmother.

By the early two-thousands, large population studies about schizophrenia and bipolar disorder had shown a familial crisscrossing history, achingly similar to that of the Mukherjees. As part of his research, Mukherjee interviews Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, who has studied schizophrenia for 30-years. Lieberman, who pioneered the study of schizophrenia by looking at twins in which one twin had the illness and the other did not, concluded that there wasn’t a single gene, but dozens of genes involved in causing schizophrenia. But while these studies established that schizophrenia had a genetic basis, they revealed nothing about the nature of the genes involved. Said Lieberman, “If we knew the identity of the genes, we would find the causes, and if we found the causes we could find medicines.”

There is little doubt why Mukherjee is such an important chronicler of the historical impact within medicine. In ” The Gene: An Intimate History,” the author weaves the epic story of his brilliant family’s history of mental illness with the significant research underway involving gene mapping and, thus, advancing toward a cure for serious mental diseases. From Calcutta, to Stanford University, to journals like Cell and Nature, Mukherjee defines a potential new era in psychiatry — neurological landscaping — in which physicians will someday be able to “perm and prune our neural synapses with medicines at will.”

In trying to help his father make peace with his family history by showing the seeming indivisibility in genetics, he summarizes, “A flaw in identity, a genetic illness, a blemish that cannot be separated from the self.”