★★★★★ The heroic epic of the twentieth century

The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology

Horace Freeland Judson

In the mid 19th century a monk named Gregor Mendel did a series of experiments on pea plants that revealed the rules of genetic inheritance. The importance of Mendel's work was unappreciated until it was rediscovered in 1900 by Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns, who duplicated Mendel's work, discovered his earlier publication, and generously gave him credit.

Over the course of the twentieth century, a cast of thousands (I say that as notice that from this point on I will stop naming scientists) figured out how inheritance works, to the extent that by 1979, when Horace Freeland Judson published The Eighth Day of Creation, we had a detailed mechanistic understanding of the answer to one of the questions children have been asking for as long as there have been human children: "Why do dogs have puppies and cats kittens? Why, when you caught a cold from Mom, did you also get a cold? Why do kids look like their parents?" (Yes, I know that looks like three questions, but really, it is one.) In the process, they also slew one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse
XKCD degree-off ,

as XKCD tells us.
This is not exaggerated -- it is all literally true. And it didn't end in 1980. When Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech made mRNA vaccines for COVID, they were literally building on discoveries of twentieth-century molecular biologists. It's a heroic tale, arguably as exciting as the age of exploration, when European explorers traveled to every corner of the world. Depending on your tastes, you may find it even more inspiring, because the heroes of this story were not swashbuckling men who fought with swords and pistols -- they were smart men and women (far more of the former than the latter, alas -- biology was not an equal-opportunity pursuit) who had truly brilliant ideas.

It is as much a story of greatness as the early twentieth century revolutions in physics. There's a mistaken tendency to think that the intellectual inaccessibility of theoretical physics implies that physicists are smarter than biologists. This error has at times been abetted by physicists themselves.

Judson's The Eighth Day of Creation is the definitive classic story of this heroic epic. Judson does, of course, name the scientists. It's a thrilling story. Of course it's a story about science and scientists, so if you don't find those subjects interesting, it'll be rough sledding.

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AnonymousJune 3, 2024 at 4:24 PM
Sounds great!
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