The story runs that he was stricken with pneumonia after spending two nights exercising in the winter rain-but the pneumonia was the culmination of another sickness. In 1946, Rajesh, my father’s third-born brother, died prematurely in Calcutta. Madness, it turns out, has been among the Mukherjees for at least two generations, and at least part of my father’s reluctance to accept Moni’s diagnosis lies in my father’s grim recognition that some kernel of the illness may be buried, like toxic waste, in himself. Of my father’s four brothers, two-not Moni’s father, but two of Moni’s uncles-suffered from various unravelings of the mind. Moni is not the only member of my father’s family with mental illness. Related Segment Lessons From the History of the Geneīut my father knew-and I knew-that there was more than just avuncular love at stake for him in these visits. My father has visited the institution in Calcutta twice-once without warning, hoping to see a transformed Moni, living a secretly normal life behind the barred gates. Over the years, he has waged a lonely countercampaign against the psychiatrists charged with his nephew’s care, hoping to convince them that their diagnosis was a colossal error, or that Moni’s broken psyche would somehow magically mend itself. My father has never accepted Moni’s diagnosis. He is kept densely medicated-awash in a sea of assorted antipsychotics and sedatives-and has an attendant watch, bathe, and feed him through the day. Since 2004, when he was forty, Moni has been confined to an institution for the mentally ill (a “lunatic home,” as my father calls it), with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. My father is the youngest of five brothers, and Moni is his first-born nephew-the eldest brother’s son. My father accompanied me, as a guide and companion, but he was a sullen and brooding presence, lost in a private anguish that I could sense only dimly. In the winter of 2012, I traveled from Delhi to Calcutta to visit my cousin Moni. The following is an excerpt from The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee.

The gene by siddhartha mukherjee