If you use a human cell line in your research, have you wondered where, or who, it came from? I never gave it much thought, until I read Rebecca Skloot’s book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. In 1951, cervical tumour cells were taken from Henrietta Lacks and put into culture, to divide endlessly and [...]

Marking the Mind is a history of scientific ideas about memory – such as the introduction of recall tasks in the 1880s, the discovery of synaptic plasticity, and debates about false memories in the 1980s and 90s. It’s the sort of book I wish existed when I first got interested in biology of memory over [...]

Getting hooked on a non-fiction book isn’t something that happens often with me. Non-fiction plods and trudges. However, ‘The Emperor Of Scent‘ by Chandler Burr is breathtakingly unique. It gallops. It has all the elements of a quintessential page turner. And it’s about science too. It got me so electrified that I repeatedly found myself [...]

Unlike most naturalists and biologists before and since, who were only satisfied if they could understand a particular form by the configuration of its immediate precedents, D’Arcy Thompson was quite satisfied with a mathematical description or a physical analogy. He truly viewed the variety of biological forms that he looked at with the eyes of [...]

From about the time our ancestors traded the nomadic lifestyle for more urban settings, agriculture has been important. It’s no coincidence either — selective breeding and domestication of crops made civilization possible. And in an era when the capacity for cultivating the primary grain and vegetable crops of the world is being stretched to its [...]

In research relating to molecular biology, it is common for animal models of disease to be used, especially in projects directed towards making biomedical discoveries and breakthroughs. So I find it very important to occasionally read about and blog against animal rights’ terrorists.

But despite Dawkins’ notoriety, maybe there are some readers here who haven’t read The Selfish Gene – I didn’t until two years ago, actually. So, what specifically is The Selfish Gene about?

With it almost being Darwin Day, it seems only right to review a book on perhaps the best popularizer of evolutionary biology in the 20th Century, Stephen Jay Gould.

If you’ve ever wondered how molecular biology came to prominence in biomedical research, why so many famous molecular biologists of the past century were trained as physicists, or when bacteriophages were first used as cloning vectors, you may be looking for a good read on the history of molecular biology. Unlike in evolutionary biology, where [...]

Russell Korobkin’s book Stem Cell Century: Law and Policy for a Breakthrough Technology is the first book to address not just embryo destruction but the full range of important policy questions raised by stem cell research and regenerative medicine.