Following on last week’s post about the NIH and English as the Language of Science, I have another selection from Arthur Kornberg’s book For the Love of Enzymes to highlight.

Essentially, Kornberg is describing the critical elements in the relationship between scientists, industry, and innovation (page 294):

One critical ingredient must be provided by industrial management if it wishes to capture and retain creative and productive scientists. It must provide an open atmosphere which encourages the scientist to discuss ideas, progress, and failures with colleagues in and out of his organization and to publish without restraint. Such an atmosphere is conductive to a flow of students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting professors through the company.

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Last October, Nobel laureate and biochemist Arthur Kornberg passed away, and I’ve finally gotten around to reading his book For the Love of Enzymes.

While there’s a lot in the book to talk about, for this post I’m focusing on just one passing reference that Kornberg makes (pages 129-134) on NIH and the use of English as the language of science. In it, Kornberg is describing the factors that made NIH a huge success, including 7 major policy decisions, the first four of which I think are most profound: Read more »

I finally got around to purchasing and reading a copy of Carl Zimmer’s Microcosm: E.coli and the New Science of Life, and I have to chastise myself for not reading it sooner.

In Microcosm, Zimmer has eloquently condensed a century of scientific study surrounding Eschericia coli into an accurate and flowing story readable by anyone with even just a modest understanding of biology.
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My all-time favorite biology writer would, without a doubt, be Lewis Thomas. Twenty-odd years before anyone had conceived of blogging, much less blogging about science, Lewis Thomas was publishing a handful of books that were on science, creative and pithy, and little more than a collection of loosely-connected essays. Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher is the most popular of his books, and is amusing light reading that will entertain biologists of all fields.

Throughout the book, Thomas reveals truly extraordinary facts about biology and microbiology that tend to leave the reader in actual awe. Another of his books, The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher, is in the same vein. For Lives of a Cell, one Amazon reviewer gave this description: Read more »

Last week’s issue of Science has a book review that might appeal to any Bitesize Bio reader: First Adventures in Science. The book in question is Falling for Science, a collection of essays by grad students (current and former) and mentors on the crucial roles particular objects played in sparking their choice of science as a vocation.

The topic makes me think of how I chose molecular biology as a field of study, wide-eyed with thoughts of playing in the lab for a job. At the time (~1994-95), the promise of the Human genome project was big in the news, I was inspired by a great High School Biology teacher, and I was in awe of the idea of a career filled with curiosity and laboratory-based tinkering.

Of course, I quickly learned the annoying truth that a lot of molecular biology involves endless repetitions of DNA preps, running gels, etc. And the inexperienced researcher gets bogged down for long periods of time in troubleshooting.

But with focus and direction, I do get to live out my early idealized version of what it would be like to be a laboratory scientist. I work relatively independently, identifying questions (and hypotheses) of interest, and acquiring/evaluating the data to answer those questions. Curiosity and data analysis ARE my job, as corny as that sounds.

As a general rule of thumb, it is recommended to be familiar with the history of one’s scientific field, and not merely the contemporary trends of thought.

That’s generally why I liked The Birth of the Cell so much when I read it. Dissatisfied by the standard accounts of the origin of the cell doctrine, Henry Harris read the original writings of the relevant early cytologists from the first visualization of animalcules to the identification of the cell nucleus and binary fission. Although very dense reading, the result is a book that describes the slow, awkward development of a science and the rivalries of the scholars involved.
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Every major field has its leading thinkers, and the biology of cancer is no different. What makes their impact heard better is when one of those leaders writes a book about it. Given my interest in molecular biology of cancer, I naturally have my favorite such book on the topic - Robert Weinberg’s One Renegade Cell.

Weinberg’s focus is on what he knows best: the mechanisms that promote and regulate the proliferation of normal and malignant cells. And for that, his explanations are the best out there. These explanations take up the first half of the book, corresponds to the early events in the development of a tumor, and makes up a coherent story. For example, he covers oncogenes, tumor suppressors, apoptosis, and to a lesser extent DNA repair, in relatively easy-to-follow language.
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What is this thing called ‘Life?’ One popular game in the relevant area of philosophy is to provide robust counter examples, which reveal failures in operational definitions of life. Failed attempts include physiological, metabolic, biochemical, genetic and thermodynamic definitions of life, all of which face problems. For example, a metabolic definition finds it hard to exclude fire (which grows and reproduces via chemical reactions), a biochemical definition does not exclude enzymes (which are biologically functional but not living systems), while a thermodynamic definition does not exclude mineral crystals (which create and sustain local order and may reproduce).
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Staying in science - getting funding and getting peer reviewed - is tough.

That’s one of my main gripes with creationist simpletons who imply that scientists are uncritical of their peers, and that criticism is directed solely at those who refuse to take their claims at face value. They have no clue whatsoever what they’re talking about.

Every scientific claim, as it’s actually being formulated, must be paved with meticulous attention to detail. The scientist advancing some newly-considered possibility must endure a constant barrage of critiquing, on both the grant application and results publication stages.

It’s for a darn good reason - people, even scientists, are prone to error.
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Leading scientists in a variety of fields gave their recommendations on life changing books at New Scientist yesterday. This makes pretty interesting reading - and certainly throws up some ideas for adding to your bookshelf.

Among the 17 recommended books were volumes as diverse as Animal Rights by Peter Singer, which turned Primatology expert Jane Goodall into a vegetarian overnight, developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik’s life-long companion, Alice in Wonderland and legendary chemist Peter Atkins’ ideal desert island companion, the Handbook of Mathematical Functions.

My life changing book would probably be The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins simply because in a single stroke it helped me de-clutter my thinking on religion. 1984 by George Orwell is also pretty far up there because, reading it as a teenager it turned my perception of human nature and politics on it’s head.

So, as the title asks… what is your life changing book?

Photo: State Of Mind