Dreamers, Visionaries, and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022656990X ISBN 13: 9780226569901

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2018

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.

About this title

About the Authors

Oren Harman is the chair of the Graduate Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel, the author of The Man Who Invented the Chromosome and The Price of Altruism, and coeditor of Rebels, Mavericks, and Heretics in Biology. He lives in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Michael R. Dietrich is professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh. He is coeditor of Rebels, Mavericks, and Heretics in Biology.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022656990X
• ISBN 13: 9780226569901
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 332
• Editor: Harman Oren, Dietrich Michael R.