Nobelist Eric Kandel's account of how his personal quest to understand memory intersected with the emergence of a new science. In Search of Memory relates the astonishing story of how four different and distinct disciplinesbehaviorist psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and molecular biologyconverged into a powerful new science of mind. Through its profound insights into thought, perception, action, recollection, and mental illness, this new science is revolutionizing our understanding of learning and memory while simultaneously showing great promise for more effective healing. The narrative follows Eric R. Kandel through the last five decades, focusing on Vienna, where he became fascinated with memory. With intrepid scientific ardor, Kandel was captivated first by history and psychoanalysis, then by neurobiology, and finally by the biological processes of memory. His resulting, multifaceted perspective was the foundation for his path-breaking research that will continue to dominate modern thoughtnot only in science but in culture at large. 50 illustrations.

In this book, Rudolf A. Raff reaches out to the scientifically queasy, using his life story and his growth as a scientist to illustrate why science matters, especially at a time when many Americans are both suspicious of science and hostile to scientific ways of thinking. Noting that science has too often been the object of controversy in school curriculums and debates on public policy issues ranging from energy and conservation to stem-cell research and climate change, Raff argues that when the public is confused or ill-informed, these issues tend to be decided on religious, economic, and political grounds that disregard the realities of the natural world. Speaking up for science and scientific literacy, Raff tells how and why he became an evolutionary biologist and describes some of the vibrant and living science of evolution. Once We All Had Gills is also the story of evolution writ large: its history, how it is studied, what it means, and why it has become a useful target in a cultural war against rational thought and the idea of a secular, religiously tolerant nation.

This book is the first devoted to modern biology s innovators and iconoclasts: men and women who challenged prevailing notions in their fields. Some of these scientists were Nobel Prize winners, some were considered cranks or gadflies, some were in fact wrong. The stories of these stubborn dissenters are individually fascinating. Taken together, they provide unparalleled insights into the role of dissent and controversy in science and especially the growth of biological thought over the past century. Each of the book s nineteen specially commissioned chapters offers a detailed portrait of the intellectual rebellion of a particular scientist working in a major area of biology--genetics, evolution, embryology, ecology, biochemistry, neurobiology, and virology as well as others. An introduction by the volume s editors and an epilogue by R. C. Lewontin draw connections among the case studies and illuminate the nonconforming scientist s crucial function of disturbing the comfort of those in the majority. By focusing on the dynamics and impact of dissent rather than on winners who are credited with scientific advances, the book presents a refreshingly original perspective on the history of the life sciences. Scientists featured in this volume: Alfred Russel Wallace Hans Driesch Wilhelm Johannsen Raymond Arthur Dart C. D. Darlington Richard Goldschmidt Barbara McClintock Oswald T. Avery Roger Sperry Leon Croizat Vero Copner Wynne-Edwards Peter Mitchell Howard Temin Motoo Kimura William D. Hamilton Carl Woese Stephen Jay Gould Thelma Rowell Daniel S. Simberloff "

"Evelyn Fox Keller trained as a theoretical physicist at a time when women didn't "do physics." Unable to find a supportive advisor, she moved into the new field of molecular biology just getting off the ground. After receiving her doctorate, she returned to physics but then took another swerve, joining a small interdisciplinary effort to develop mathematical models of biological systems. This work led to her appointment to a special position as Professor of Mathematics and Humanities at Northeastern University. When second-wave feminism arrived in the 1960s, it changed the lives of everyone in its path. It certainly changed Keller's, leading her beyond the borders of science altogether. Eventually she began to think of herself as a dual citizen of the proverbial two cultures―science and humanities. The trajectory was hardly straightforward, nor was it conducive to building a conventional career, or even getting a job. Now in hindsight, after an illustrious career and having published fourteen books, Keller reflects on her life, influences, successes and struggles along her trailblazing path as a scientist and feminist." -- From publisher's website

What are the conditions that foster true novelty and allow visionaries to set their eyes on unknown horizons? What have been the challenges that have spawned new innovations, and how have they shaped modern biology? In Dreamers, Visionaries, and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences , editors Oren Harman and Michael R. Dietrich explore these questions through the lives of eighteen exemplary biologists who had grand and often radical ideas that went far beyond the run-of-the-mill science of their peers. From the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who coined the word “biology” in the early nineteenth century, to the American James Lovelock, for whom the Earth is a living, breathing organism, these dreamers innovated in ways that forced their contemporaries to reexamine comfortable truths. With this collection readers will follow Jane Goodall into the hidden world of apes in African jungles and Francis Crick as he attacks the problem of consciousness. Join Mary Lasker on her campaign to conquer cancer and follow geneticist George Church as he dreams of bringing back woolly mammoths and Neanderthals. In these lives and the many others featured in these pages, we discover visions that were sometimes fantastical, quixotic, and even threatening and destabilizing, but always a challenge to the status quo.

What are the conditions that foster true novelty and allow visionaries to set their eyes on unknown horizons? What have been the challenges that have spawned new innovations, and how have they shaped modern biology? In Dreamers, Visionaries, and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences , editors Oren Harman and Michael R. Dietrich explore these questions through the lives of eighteen exemplary biologists who had grand and often radical ideas that went far beyond the run-of-the-mill science of their peers. From the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who coined the word “biology” in the early nineteenth century, to the American James Lovelock, for whom the Earth is a living, breathing organism, these dreamers innovated in ways that forced their contemporaries to reexamine comfortable truths. With this collection readers will follow Jane Goodall into the hidden world of apes in African jungles and Francis Crick as he attacks the problem of consciousness. Join Mary Lasker on her campaign to conquer cancer and follow geneticist George Church as he dreams of bringing back woolly mammoths and Neanderthals. In these lives and the many others featured in these pages, we discover visions that were sometimes fantastical, quixotic, and even threatening and destabilizing, but always a challenge to the status quo.

This milestone extensive work combines the essentials of history – biography, chronology, political and economic background – with the observations, theories, principles, laws and equations that constitute the specifics of science. The 5800-page Encyclopedia arises from the conviction that the optimal perspective on science is through the lens of history, setting aside traditional divisions of discipline and specialty, and rising above geopolitical boundaries. Reaching from 4,200 BCE to the 21st century CE, the Encyclopedia tells (as the author himself puts it) "not only who did it and when it was done but also precisely what was done." The author, Ari Ben-Menahem, surveys 100 generations of great thinkers, offering 2070 detailed biographies of scientists, engineers, explorers and inventors, who left their mark on the history of science and technology. The span of coverage is all-encompassing: mathematics, philosophy, logic, physical and environmental sciences (including physics, chemistry, astronomy, earth and space sciences and cosmology), life sciences (biology, medicine, physiology, botany, zoology and biochemistry), associated engineering disciplines, and the social sciences (among them economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, linguistics and more). The six-volume Encyclopedia also includes 380 articles summarizing the time-line of ideas in the leading fields of science, technology, mathematics and philosophy, plus useful tables, figures and photos, and 20 ‘Science Progress Reports’ detailing scientific setbacks. Interspersed throughout are quotations, gathered from the wit and wisdom of sages, savants and scholars throughout the ages from antiquity to modern times.

Selected by his daughter, Vivien, from Max Perutz's voluminous correspondence, the letters reproduced here portray their author with a spontaneity and directness no autobiography could have matched. They chronicle Perutz's adventurous life through his own vivid, erudite and humorous pen, documenting the hopes, roadblocks and moments of elation of his sixty-year quest to understand the molecular biology of hemoglobin. The first great step in this quest ― unraveling the molecular structure of hemoglobin ― earned Perutz the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Narrated against a backdrop of family and friends, politics and war, literature, travels, and Max's beloved mountains, these letters provide rare insight into the thoughts of a remarkable and very human scientist, and delightful sketches of some of the people he encountered. Starting with lively letters to a girlfriend written in his youth in Vienna and the impressions of a young scientist in Cambridge, the letters progress to the desperate pleas of an "enemy alien" interned in Canada during World War II. The diary of Perutz's subsequent super-secret war work for the British to build a floating ice airstrip in the North Atlantic, ardent campaigning letters to scientists and politicians, and self-deprecating stories of his own mishaps written to amuse his children and grandchildren are some of the many highlights of these fascinating letters, unique in the annals of recent scientific history. This book is a companion to Georgina Ferry's Max Perutz and the Secret of Life. Together these volumes provide a portrait of an extraordinary character in the development of molecular biology.