Dreamers, Visionaries, and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences

By: Oren Harman and Michael R. Dietrich

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Synopsis: 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.

Book Quality:: Publisher Quality
ISBN-13:: 9780226570075
Related ISBNs:: 9780226569871, 9780226569901
Publisher:: University of Chicago Press
Date of Addition:: 07/23/18
Copyrighted By:: The University of Chicago Press
Adult content:: No
Language:: English
Has Image Descriptions:: No
Categories:: History, Nonfiction, Science, Biographies and Memoirs, Technology
Submitted By:: Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:: This is a copyrighted book.