Welcome to Inside the New York Times Book Review.

I'm Pamela Paul.

What is it that makes us who we are?

Until the discovery of genetics, heredity was a complete mystery.

Siddhartha Mukherjee joins us to talk about the gene and intimate history.

The more I thought about disease illness, the more I came back to the question of inheritance.

What do we inherit?

What do our families give to us?

How much of it is genetic?

How much of it is environmental?

Jenselai, my colleague here at the Book Review will tell us about two new books about so-called

good taste and why we like what we like.

Our tastes change.

They change over time.

And also we ourselves might not be fully aware of what it is that we like until we're

presented with a particular situation.

Alexander Alter has literary news.

And Greg Cole's Paral Segal and I get to talk about what we and other people are reading.

Before the discovery of the gene, many of the world's great thinkers puzzled over the problem of heredity.

Aristotle thought it might have something to do with blood.

Darwin also knew his theory of evolution, depended on something invisible, but something as yet undetected.

In his new book, author Sidhartha Mukherjee looks at how the idea of the gene had to be invented before it could actually be discovered and then studied.

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