Over the past decade I’ve had the pleasure of running a genetics book club, first as an occasional focus for my laboratory’s group meeting, and later for the Institute of Human Genetics at UCSF (University of California, San Francisco). Many books have been suggested, digested, and discussed by these two enthusiastic sets of readers. We have cast a wide net, from genetics, human-inherited disease, and evolution, to chemistry, physics, and invention; we have also ranged from scientific narrative and biography to fiction and science fiction. I would like to acknowledge my fellow book lovers, as they have opened up new worlds of reading for me and have endured some of my own passions. Here, follow some of my personal top picks in this spectrum of books; I have chosen not to restrict my recommendations to genetics, as I suspect you too may enjoy reading about many aspects of science. My offering is not comprised of “deep” reviews in that my comments are neither very detailed nor highly critical; rather, it is a summing up, with brief description, of the books I’ve most enjoyed and highly recommend to you or your family and friends.
Memoir
I begin with the memoir, my favorite genre — perhaps not surprisingly since I write the Interviews column for PLoS Genetics. In this category, my hands-down top recommendation is James Watson’s enduring The Double Helix. If you haven’t yet tagged along with this irreverent romp through the discovery of the structure of DNA, I urge you to do so. It is short and impossible to put down once you begin. The book generated quite a bit of controversy when it was written in the late 1960s; some participants in the drama argued that they were poorly portrayed and many others complained of its dismissive posthumous treatment of Rosalind Franklin. In truth, Watson’s memoir doesn’t portray Watson himself in any shining light either, and this is one of its charms. Watson’s naked memoir captures an extraordinary two-year period when post-war Cambridge, England redirected its scientific energies towards solving fundamental biological problems, and a youthful Watson hijacked Francis Crick into thinking about DNA’s structure. I recommend the new, annotated version, issued by Cold Spring Harbor Press in honor of the structure’s 60th birthday, which includes photos and documents that further bring the story to life, while also providing the historical tether that it is often accused of lacking.
Uncle Tungsten is a memoir by the neurologist and incomparable storyteller Oliver Sacks. Sacks describes growing up in London circa WWII in a lively, large, and highly intellectual family, including an uncle — Uncle Tungsten — who runs a light bulb factory. Indeed, Tungsten isn’t the only maternal uncle with a chemical bent; seven other maternal uncles worked in the field of mineralogy! The memoir is a homage to chemistry, with the feel of elements and the smell of experiments swirling in a Proustian reverie of a time when well-to-do families could afford to have chemistry laboratories in their own homes.
Another endearing memoir of boyhood is My Family and Other Animals, in which the British naturalist and conservationist Gerald Durrell recounts his family’s move from the rainy UK to sunny Corfu during the 1930s. There, the 10-year-old Durrell takes on the natural history of the island, securing a mentor who meets with him weekly to study the fauna he encounters and then bringing home terrapins and tortoises, birds and scorpions, indeed all manner of creatures to his tenderly and delightfully drawn family. Would that all of us could have had such an unfettered, exploratory childhood!
(SeniorWomen.com’s Editor’s Note: A most engaging accounting of this quirky but endearing family’s adventure on Corfu. In addition to reading the book, we enjoyed viewing a Masterpiece Theater presentation and a DVD.)
I also recommend a pseudo-memoir, The Search, a first-person fictional account of one man’s path in becoming a scientist. Writing in the early 1930s, C. P. Snow, himself a scientist-turned-author (who later gave the influential Rede Lecture in 1959 on the lack of communication between the arts and sciences), chronicles the intellectual, professional, and moral journey of his protagonist, Arthur Miles, a mirror for Snow himself. We meet Miles in the UK before WWI when he and his father look out at the night sky and young Arthur vows to become a scientist. He makes the decision to pursue chemistry, inspired by his high school teacher’s enthusiasm for Niels Bohr and the newly described structure of the atom. Miles chooses the new field of X-ray crystallography for his life’s work, first studying manganates, then later an unspecified biological problem. He plots out his career, jockeying to launch and lead a new institute and, ultimately, moving on from science altogether. I recommend this book because, even though the action takes place nearly a century ago, Snow, in the voice of Miles, eerily captures a passion, decision, discouragement, or dilemma that I myself have faced and probably you have, too. Graduate students take note: Miles’s dearest lifelong friends are those he made in graduate school, and I think this will resonate for many readers.
Downton Abbey ‘Flower Show’ jigsaw puzzle, one of five show subjects given to us by the family over the Holidays, a fitting entertainment during the series.