Max Perutz And The Secret Of Life

Author : Georgina Ferry
Publisher : Random House
Page : 386 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2010-12-15
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781446402658

Get Book

Max Perutz And The Secret Of Life by Georgina Ferry Pdf

Few scientists have thought more deeply about their calling and its impact on humanity than Max Perutz (1914-2002). Born in Vienna, Jewish by descent, lapsed Catholic by religion, Max came to Cambridge in 1936, to join the lab of the legendary Communist thinker J.D. Bernal. In 1940 he was interned and deported to Canada as an enemy alien, only to be brought back and set to work on a bizarre top secret war project. Seven years later he founded the small research group in which Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the structure of DNA. Max Perutz himself explored the protein haemoglobin and his work, which won him a shared Nobel Prize in 1962, launched a new era of medicine, heralding today's astonishing advances in the genetic basis of disease. Max Perutz's story, wonderfully told by Georgina Ferry, brims with life; it has the zest of an adventure novel and is full of extraordinary characters. Max was demanding, passionate and driven but also humorous, compassionate and loving. Georgina Ferry's absorbing biography is a marvellous tribute to a great scientist.

Author : Max F. Perutz
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 388 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2002
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 019859027X

Get Book

I Wish I'd Made You Angry Earlier by Max F. Perutz Pdf

This collection of essays from Nobel Laureate Max Perutz explores a wide range of scientific and personal topics with insight and lucidity. It includes lively anecdotes about key figures in 20th-century science.

Author : Max F. Perutz
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 544 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2009
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : UOM:39015080859799

Get Book

What a Time I Am Having by Max F. Perutz Pdf

Selected by his daughter Vivien, these letters chronicle Perutz's life through his own vivid, erudite, and humorous pen. With a spontaneity and directness no autobiography can match, this volume captures the hopes, roadblocks, and moments of elation throughout his 60-year quest to understand the molecular biology of hemoglobin.

Author : Brenda Maddox
Publisher : Harper Collins
Page : 355 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2013-02-26
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780062283504

Get Book

Rosalind Franklin by Brenda Maddox Pdf

In 1962, Maurice Wilkins, Francis Crick, and James Watson received the Nobel Prize, but it was Rosalind Franklin's data and photographs of DNA that led to their discovery. Brenda Maddox tells a powerful story of a remarkably single-minded, forthright, and tempestuous young woman who, at the age of fifteen, decided she was going to be a scientist, but who was airbrushed out of the greatest scientific discovery of the twentieth century.

Author : Hans-Joachim Niemann
Publisher : Mohr Siebeck
Page : 170 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2014-07-17
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 3161532074

Get Book

Karl Popper and the Two New Secrets of Life by Hans-Joachim Niemann Pdf

The story of how humans and all living things came into existence is told in two widely believed versions: the Book of Genesis and Darwin's Origin of Species . It was the philosopher Karl Popper who presented us with a third story, no less important. His New Interpretation of Darwinism denies the creative power of blind chance and natural selection and establishes knowledge and activity of all living beings as the real driving forces of evolution. Thus, spiritual elements are back in the theory of evolution, and in Popper's view "the entire evolution is an adventure of the mind." In this book, Hans-Joachim Niemann establishes Karl Popper as an eminent philosopher of biology. In the first chapter, biographical details are unearthed concerning how Popper's biological interests were inspired by a biological meeting in the old windmill at Hunstanton in 1936. The second chapter focusses on the year 1986 when Popper, in several lectures, summarized the results of his life-long biological thinking. The most important of these, the Medawar Lecture given at the Royal Society London, was lost for a long time and is now printed in the Appendix. A new world view begins to emerge that is completely different from Creationism or Darwinism. Twenty years after Popper's death, the last chapter looks back on his biological thoughts in the light of new results of molecular biology. His attack at that time on long-lasting dogmas of evolutionary theory turned out to be largely justified. The new biology seems even well suited to support Popper's endeavour to overcome the gloomy aspects of Darwinism that have made organisms passive parts of a machinery of deadly competition. Neither blind chance nor natural selection are the creative forces of all life, but rather knowledge and activity. How they came into existence is still a secret and a worthwhile research programme.--

Author : James D. Watson
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 266 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 1998-02-27
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780684852799

Get Book

Double Helix by James D. Watson Pdf

Portions of this book were first published in The Atlantic monthly.

Author : Carl Zimmer
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2008-05-06
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780307377562

Get Book

Microcosm by Carl Zimmer Pdf

A Best Book of the YearSeed Magazine • Granta Magazine • The Plain-DealerIn this fascinating and utterly engaging book, Carl Zimmer traces E. coli's pivotal role in the history of biology, from the discovery of DNA to the latest advances in biotechnology. He reveals the many surprising and alarming parallels between E. coli's life and our own. And he describes how E. coli changes in real time, revealing billions of years of history encoded within its genome. E. coli is also the most engineered species on Earth, and as scientists retool this microbe to produce life-saving drugs and clean fuel, they are discovering just how far the definition of life can be stretched.

Author : Denis Noble
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 315 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2017
Category : Medical
ISBN : 9781107176249

Get Book

Dance to the Tune of Life by Denis Noble Pdf

This book formulates a relativistic theory of biology, challenging the common gene-centred view of organisms.

Author : James D. Watson
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2003
Category : Molecular biologists
ISBN : 9780198606932

Get Book

Genes, Girls and Gamow by James D. Watson Pdf

Genes, Girls and Gamow is an autobiographical account of Jim Watson's life, following on from The Double Helix, the story of his and Francis Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA (published in 1968). Here is Watson adjusting to new-found fame, carrying out tantalizing experiments on the role of RNA in biology, and falling in love, in a tale of heartbreak, scientific excitement and ambition, laced with travelogue and '50s atmosphere.

Author : Kenneth C. Holmes
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 381 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2017-02-09
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781107147379

Get Book

Aaron Klug - A Long Way from Durban by Kenneth C. Holmes Pdf

The life and work of Aaron Klug, Nobel prize winner and one of the pioneers of structural molecular biology.

Author : Horace Freeland Judson
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 714 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2004-01-01
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 8796947853

Get Book

The Eighth Day of Creation by Horace Freeland Judson Pdf

Author : Graham Farmelo
Publisher : Faber & Faber
Page : 554 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2009-01-22
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780571250073

Get Book

The Strangest Man by Graham Farmelo Pdf

'A monumental achievement - one of the great scientific biographies.' Michael Frayn The Strangest Man is the Costa Biography Award-winning account of Paul Dirac, the famous physicist sometimes called the British Einstein. He was one of the leading pioneers of the greatest revolution in twentieth-century science: quantum mechanics. The youngest theoretician ever to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, he was also pathologically reticent, strangely literal-minded and legendarily unable to communicate or empathize. Through his greatest period of productivity, his postcards home contained only remarks about the weather.Based on a previously undiscovered archive of family papers, Graham Farmelo celebrates Dirac's massive scientific achievement while drawing a compassionate portrait of his life and work. Farmelo shows a man who, while hopelessly socially inept, could manage to love and sustain close friendship.The Strangest Man is an extraordinary and moving human story, as well as a study of one of the most exciting times in scientific history. 'A wonderful book . . . Moving, sometimes comic, sometimes infinitely sad, and goes to the roots of what we mean by truth in science.' Lord Waldegrave, Daily Telegraph

Author : Brent R. Stockwell
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2011-06-01
Category : Medical
ISBN : 9780231525527

Get Book

The Quest for the Cure by Brent R. Stockwell Pdf

After more than fifty years of blockbuster drug development, skeptics are beginning to fear we are reaching the end of drug discovery to combat major diseases. In this engaging book, Brent R. Stockwell, a leading researcher in the exciting new science of chemical biology, describes this dilemma and the powerful techniques that may bring drug research into the twenty-first century. Filled with absorbing stories of breakthroughs, this book begins with the scientific achievements of the twentieth century that led to today's drug innovations. We learn how the invention of mustard gas in World War I led to early anti-cancer agents and how the efforts to decode the human genome might lead to new approaches in drug design. Stockwell then turns to the seemingly incurable diseases we face today, such as Alzheimer's, many cancers, and others with no truly effective medicines, and details the cellular and molecular barriers thwarting scientists equipped with only the tools of traditional pharmaceutical research. Scientists such as Stockwell are now developing methods to combat these complexities technologies for constructing and testing millions of drug candidates, sophisticated computational modeling, and entirely new classes of drug molecules all with an eye toward solving the most profound mysteries of living systems and finding cures for intractable diseases. If successful, these methods will unlock a vast terrain of untapped drug targets that could lead to a bounty of breakthrough medicines. Offering a rare, behind-the-scenes look at this cutting-edge research, The Quest for the Cure tells a thrilling story of science, persistence, and the quest to develop a new generation of cures.

Author : Georgina Ferry,John Sulston
Publisher : Random House
Page : 358 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2010-12-15
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781409058007

Get Book

The Common Thread by Georgina Ferry,John Sulston Pdf

John Sulston was director of the Sanger Centre in Cambridge from 1993 to 2000. There he led the British arm of the international team selected to map the entire human DNA sequence, a feat that was pulled off in record time by an extraordinary collaboration of scientists. Despite innumerable setbacks and challenges from outside competitors the ultimate success of the project can be attributed in large part to John Sulston's own determination, passion and scientific excellence. In this personal account he takes us behind the scenes of one of the largest international scientific operations ever undertaken. He is frank about the competition with Craig Venter and Celera Genomics, which threatened to undermine the international community's attempts to make the sequence freely available to everyone. He shares with us his excitement as the project unfolded. And as a pragmatist he reveals his hopes and concerns as to how the information unlocked by the Human Genome Project will affect people's lives in the future. The Common Thread is at once a compelling history of this most exciting of scientific breakthroughs and also an impassioned call for ethical responsibility in scientific research. As the boundaries between science and big business increasingly blur, and researchers race to patent medical discoveries, the international community needs to find a common protocol for the protection of the wider human interest. The Common Thread tells a story of our shared human heritage, offering hope for future research and a fresh outlook on our scientific understanding of ourselves.

Author : Matthew Cobb
Publisher : Basic Books
Page : 464 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2015-07-07
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780465062669

Get Book

Life's Greatest Secret by Matthew Cobb Pdf

Everyone has heard of the story of DNA as the story of Watson and Crick and Rosalind Franklin, but knowing the structure of DNA was only a part of a greater struggle to understand life’s secrets. Life’s Greatest Secret is the story of the discovery and cracking of the genetic code, the thing that ultimately enables a spiraling molecule to give rise to the life that exists all around us. This great scientific breakthrough has had farreaching consequences for how we understand ourselves and our place in the natural world, and for how we might take control of our (and life’s) future. Life’s Greatest Secret mixes remarkable insights, theoretical dead-ends, and ingenious experiments with the swift pace of a thriller. From New York to Paris, Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Cambridge, England, and London to Moscow, the greatest discovery of twentieth-century biology was truly a global feat. Biologist and historian of science Matthew Cobb gives the full and rich account of the cooperation and competition between the eccentric characters—mathematicians, physicists, information theorists, and biologists—who contributed to this revolutionary new science. And, while every new discovery was a leap forward for science, Cobb shows how every new answer inevitably led to new questions that were at least as difficult to answer: just ask anyone who had hoped that the successful completion of the Human Genome Project was going to truly yield the book of life, or that a better understanding of epigenetics or “junk DNA” was going to be the final piece of the puzzle. But the setbacks and unexpected discoveries are what make the science exciting, and it is Matthew Cobb’s telling that makes them worth reading. This is a riveting story of humans exploring what it is that makes us human and how the world works, and it is essential reading for anyone who’d like to explore those questions for themselves.