A Guinea Pig's History Of Biology
The plants and animals who taught us the facts of life
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
The triumphs of recent biology - understanding hereditary disease, the modern theory of evolution - are all thanks to the fruit fly, the guinea pig, the zebra fish and a handful of other organisms, which have helped us unravel one of life's greatest mysteries - inheritance.
Jim Endersby traces his story from Darwin hand-pollinating passion flowers in his back garden in an effort to find out whether his decision to marry his cousin had harmed their children, to today's high-tech laboratories, full of shoals of shimmering zebra fish, whose bodies are transparent until they are mature, allowing scientists to watch every step as a single fertilised cell multiples to become millions of specialised cells that make up a new fish. Each story has - piece by piece - revealed how DNA determines the characteristics of the adult organism. Not every organism was as cooperative as the fruit fly or zebra fish, some provided scientists with misleading answers or encouraged them to ask the wrong questions.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Like all the sciences, biology is rooted in observation, but in order to tease out the principles of reproduction and genetic inheritance, biologists needed to find plants and animals with fast breeding cycles hence the popularity of guinea pigs, zebra fish and fruit flies as experimental subjects. Endersby's history explains how such life forms have been put to use by scientists from Charles Darwin's age to the present. But the flora and fauna are just a hook for Endersby, a lecturer in history at the University of Sussex, to talk about the scientists, and he's often at his most winning delving into biographical details, like the friendship between science writer Paul de Kruif and Sinclair Lewis, whom de Kruif advised on science and medicine for the novel Arrowsmith. He's also good at spotlighting small events that had sweeping consequences, like the 1847 repeal of a British tax on glass, which led to more greenhouses, which led to an outburst of botanical observation. Later chapters broach hot-button topics like genetically modified food and the backlash against animal testing. Endersby offers a fresh take and surprising conclusions ("Mendel did not invent modern genetics") on familiar material. 12 b&w illus.