Three profoundly destabilizing scientific ideas ricochet through the twentieth century, trisecting it into three unequal parts: the atom, the byte, the gene. . . . Each begins its life as a rather abstract scientific concept but grows to invade multiple human discourses—thereby transforming culture, society, politics, and language. But the most crucial parallel between the three ideas, by far, is conceptual: each represents the irreducible unit—the building block, the basic organizational unit—of a larger whole: the atom, of matter; the byte (or “bit”), of digitized information; the gene, of heredity and biological information. . . . Matter, information, and biology are inherently hierarchically organized: understanding that smallest part is crucial to understanding the whole.”

—Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History (2016)