Telling the True Story of Biology

Discovery—Windows on the Life Sciences By R.A. Lewis Malden, MA: Blackwell Science (2001). 235 pp. $32.95Where do new scientists come from? This is a question that has many answers, of course, but the simplest and most direct answer is that they come from educational institutions. Scientists get their early training in the same places that teach them how to read, write, and do arithmetic. For better or for worse, every year the primary and secondary institutions of education in the United States produce tens of thousands of students who enter college intending to pursue a career in science. These days, most of those students have the life sciences in mind, and this means that they face a time-honored hurdle on their way to a biology or biochemistry major—introductory biology.On many campuses, including my own, entry-level courses in biology carry some of the highest enrollments of any academic subject. If we are going to recruit talented young people into the scientific community, these courses are the place to start. Given the huge enrollments of introductory biology courses, one would also think that the forces of the marketplace would have produced some extraordinary textbooks. In a way, they have. Publishers have produced a herd of beautiful, well-illustrated comprehensive textbooks that compete vigorously and tempt instructors with time-saving goodies such as test generators, computer-friendly illustration files, and even predesigned course web sites. The price of these glittering baskets of ancillaries, built into the costs of textbooks, can be staggering. The launch of a single new comprehensive college biology textbook may exceed ten million dollars.Up-front costs of this magnitude tend to force publishers away from the risks of innovation, and the result is that nearly all books today follow the successful strategy exemplified by Neil Campbell's Biology series (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1998). Everything is covered, often in exquisite detail. Whether your own research is in photosynthesis or taxonomy, cell motility or anatomy, you will find enough depth in your own field to make you confident that the authors of this book know, understand, and validate your scientific work. In the academic marketplace, where books are chosen by individual scientist-teachers and not by students, best-sellers are born from the successful application of this strategy. The truth is that books like Biology are wonderful teaching resources. It is also true that they are very, very large—Campbell's fifth edition tips the scales at more than 3 kilograms.The size and comprehensive nature of these big books go hand-in-hand, and if complete coverage of a field is the way to inspire young scientists, they may be just the thing to support introductory biology. There is, however, another way to teach science—smaller, less spectacular, and until now, less-respected by the marketplace. That other way is to tell stories.I am convinced that all great teachers (and the American scientific community has had its share), are storytellers. I would also suggest that the most successful university science courses are not those that cram in the largest numbers of facts, but those who use scientific fact and context to weave stories of discovery and innovation that help students to follow the train of ideas, guesswork, and dumb luck that drives the scientific enterprise forward. This approach gives students a chance to understand the human drama and the flow of ideas behind scientific discovery, something that is in remarkably short supply in the “big” books used for most courses.Compared to its competition, Ricki Lewis' Discovery—Windows on the Life Sciences is a lightweight—in the very best sense of that word. Tipping the scales at just 444 grams, it carries no pretense of being a comprehensive biology textbook. It is, instead, a wonderful paperback that tells what might be best described as nine of Dr. Lewis' favorite stories. Readers of The Scientist will be familiar with her skillful and insightful writings on a variety of scientific issues, which have become one of that periodical's most attractive features. In this paperback, she has melded her skills as a journalist with the insights of a true scientist to produce a series of highly readable accounts of scientific discovery.Lewis is unusually skilled at helping her readers to follow connections between seemingly unrelated research fields that are brought together from time to time in flashes of scientific insight. Her careful focus on the development of ideas helps to give this book an emphasis on individual scientists that most textbooks sadly lack. She introduces us to the likes of Jim Schlatter, who synthesized the artificial sweetener aspartame; Robin Warren and Barry Marshall, who identified the bacterial cause of ulcers; and Beatrice Mintz, whose chimeric mice redirected the study of mammalian development.Several of her chapter-long stories follow the development of grand ideas—probing the origin of life and redefining the classification of living organisms. Others are scientific detective stories—tracing the causes of BSE and uncovering the role that telomeres play in cellular life span. A few are highly specific, such as the relationship of homocysteine to cardiovascular disease, and several deal with matters in today's headlines, including genetically modified foods and stem cells. Despite their wide range, Lewis is careful to trace each story to its scientific roots. Her chapter on cloning, for example, begins not with “Dolly” but with Weismann and Spemann, and then successfully captures the atmosphere of excitement and doubt that surrounded John Gurdon's successful amphibian cloning experiments of the 1960s.Lewis' Discovery is not about to displace the big books that have become a standard in so many Biology 101 lecture halls around the country. It does not tell students the function of the lac repressor, the number of proteins in the small ribosomal subunit, or how to distinguish an ascomycete from a deuteromycete. What Discovery does do is to tell a series of wonderful stories in a way that will help students understand the allure of the scientific enterprise and the passion with which the best researchers approach their work. Having read and enjoyed every one of Lewis' “windows” on the life sciences, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if twenty or thirty years from now some of our most creative life scientists trace their passion for research to this little paperback, assigned for their first college course. They might not remember its title or the name of its author, but I would bet that they will never forget the view it gave them of science.