Ken Burns adapting The Gene book into series for PBS

Ken Burns is getting back into medicine. The documentarian has acquired the rights to make author Siddhartha Mukherjee’s book on molecular biology, “The Gene: An Intimate History,” into a series for PBS. The Washington PBS station, WETA, announced the deal Thursday, but included no public timetable for when it might get on the air. Burns is assembling the same production team, led by Barak Goodman, that adapted Mukherjee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies” into a 2015 series. They used the book as a framework for the film. “The Gene” details the discovery of the science behind how traits are passed from generation to generation.