His inviting prose proposes "to tell the story of the human genome... chromosome by chromosome, by picking a gene from each."
http://www.amazon.com/Genome-Matt-Ridley/dp/0060932902
The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond
Jared Diamond states the theme of his book up-front: "How the human species changed, within a short time, from just another species of big mammal to a world conqueror; and how we acquired the capacity to reverse all that progress overnight."
The Secret Life of Lobsters by Trevor Corson
Corson brings together the often conflicting worlds of commercial lobstermen and marine scientists, showing how the two sides joined forces and tried for 15 years to solve the mystery of why the lobsters were disappearing. He brings the story to life by concentrating on the lobstermen and their families who live in one Maine fishing community, Little Cranberry Island, and alternating narratives of their lives with accounts of the research of scientists who, obsessed with the curious life of lobsters, conduct experiments that are often as strange and complex as the lobsters themselves. Corson provides more information about the lobster's unusual anatomy, eating habits and sex life than most readers will probably want to know, but he makes it all fascinating, especially when he juxtaposes observations of human behavior and descriptions of the social life of lobsters.
The Double Helix by James Watson
"Science seldom proceeds in the straightforward logical manner imagined by outsiders," writes James Watson in The Double Helix, his account of his codiscovery (along with Francis Crick) of the structure of DNA.
The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time by Jonathan Weiner
Rosemary and Peter Grant and those assisting them have spend twenty years on Daphne Major, an island in the Galapagos studying natural selection. They recognize each individual bird on the island, when there are four hundred at the time of the author's visit, or when there are over a thousand. They have observed about twenty generations of finches -- continuously.
Jonathan Weiner follows these scientists as they watch Darwin's finches and come up with a new understanding of life itself.
Jonathan Weiner follows these scientists as they watch Darwin's finches and come up with a new understanding of life itself.
An Imagined World: A Story of Scientific Discovery by June Goodfield
An Imagined World follows the scientific research of Anna Britt as she explores the connections between cancer and iron (among many other things). June Goodfield, a philosopher of science, weaves together all the bits and pieces of science - the euphoria of insight, the dynamics of an international laboratory, the problem of obtaining funding, the need for exact experiments and an open mind - and creates a mystery that is both suspenseful and comprehensible.
A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock by Evelyn Fox Keller
Barbara McClintock was one of the premier investigators in cytology and classical genetics, but her work was pushed out of the mainstream by the revolution in molecular biology in the middle of this century. Thirty years later, the simple truths sought by research scientists whose training was closer to physics than biology continued to prove elusive, and the discovery of transposons in bacteria marked the beginning of a revival of interest in her work. Keller's analysis of McClintock's difficulty in finding a place to work and her relations with other investigators is insightful and thought-provoking, not only about women in science, but about the role of dissent in the scientific community.
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