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

A minireview recently in Genomics caught my eye with the title Coexpression, coregulation, and cofunctionality of neighboring genes in eukaryotic genomes that sounded just like a passage that I recalled from Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene:

…the ‘environment’ of a gene consists largely of other genes, each of which is itself being selected for its ability to cooperate with its environment of other genes. (page 39) … Genes are selected, not as ‘good’ in isolation, but as good at working against the background of other genes in the gene pool. A good gene must be compatible with, and complementary to, the other genes with whom it has to share a long succession of bodies. (page 84)

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I just got done reading Ernst Mayr’s The Growth of Biological Thought, which is on the history and philosophy of biology, from Aristotle to ~1980 (written in 1982). Of particular interest to me was the section on the Modern Synthesis, where the views on evolution of the geneticists and other experimental biologists were reconciled with that of the naturalists. (Or, if you prefer, the Synthesis finally merged Darwin and Mendel.)

What of comparably brilliant books on evolutionary biology, post-Synthesis, from the point of view of genetics, molecular biology, and related disciplines? I won’t pretend to have read every such book out there, but below the fold is a list of some of the more seminal books, IMHO. Please add to them in the comments! Read more »

Reports, grant applications, theses, manuscripts, essays, patent applications, your Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

As a scientist, there are so many things you have to write. And writing them well is important. Writing clearly and with structure allows you to get your message across and avoiding grammatical errors stops you looking stupid in front of your audience in Stockholm.

But writing is just one of the many transferrable skills you have to master to get on in science - how will you ever get the time to work on it? Read more »

One of the common arguments from religionists against scientific determinism is that of Free Will. Clearly, we humans possess the capacity for making choices, and have some influence over the direction of our lives. Our cells, too, possess the capacity for choice, as do bacteria and even molecules. For us, our choices are reducible to events in our neural circuitry, and the neurotransmitter kinetics determine the degree of difficulty or ease of our choices or lack thereof, and Free Will is itself an emergent property that is not special to our species.

Enter Howard Berg. In his 1993 book, Random Walks in Biology, Berg presents a terse and simple series of mathematical formulations of the various factors observable in biophysics, ranging from stochastic to deterministic elements. It is very much in the tradition of Shrödinger’s classic What is Life?, where the physicist seeks to formalize basic elements of biology. Read more »