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Contact: admin@jewish-sci-tech-books.com Compiled by Roger Shlomo Harris
URL: http://www.jewish-sci-tech-books.com/catalogue/genetics.htm Copyright © 2003
       

Genetics

Books for Sale

 

PRIMARY FOCUS: Jonathan Weiner's description of Seymour Benzer's research into the connections between genetics and behaviour.

 
Time, Love, Memory - A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behaviour

Author: Jonathan Weiner © 1999.
Format: Hardback (board colour: ) with spine bound in black. Plain off-white endpapers. Dust-jacket. Size: about 16.5cm W x 24.2cm H x 2.8cm T. Pages: xii + 305. Uncut fore-edge. Index. The last page contains a note on the book's typeface; it is called Fairfield and it was created by the American artist and engraver Rudolph Ruzicka (1883-1978).
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, U.S.A.
ISBN: 0-679-44435-1.
Status: New.

Contents page

Dust-jacket notes about this book and its author:
 
FRONT FLAP: With the discovery of the double helix a generation ago, it was inevitable that we would ask new questions about the origins of behavior - animal and human. How much of our fate is decided before we are born? What is written and in what code? What chain of reactions leads from a twisted strand of DNA to a raucous laugh? To a thought? To a memory? To a head turning toward the light? To the habit of frown­ing? To a raised hand or a raised wing?
 
The man who has given us our first concrete and often astonishing answers is the maverick scientist Seymour Benzer - one of the greatest biologists of the century. His early work on the gene helped transform biological research, and the experiments that he began at the California Institute of Technology - experiments that are, like Benzer himself, at once whimsical, serious, and highly original are now transforming the study of genes and behavior.
 
In this book, Jonathan Weiner the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of one of the most admired and engaging books about evolution, The Beak of the Finch, tells the story of Benzer and his work.
 
Weiner spent almost five years in the Fly Rooms of Benzer, his students, and his colleagues, who are coming closer and closer to the connections between genes and behavior by breeding mutant fruit flies. We watch over the scientists' shoulders as they inject genes into fly embryos with microsyringes to create lines of flies with fast clocks and slow clocks (their hours of waking and sleeping changed), flies with good and bad memories, flies with no luck in love. We see that changing a single letter of genetic code can change a fly's behavior. And we see how many of the genes that Benzer and his students have discovered in flies are now showing up in worms, in mice, and in human beings.
 
"If he hadn't done it," says Francis Crick, "no one else would have done it." By breeding generations of flies in fly bottles and conducting his experiments with those tiny creatures, Seymour Benzer has changed the way we think about behavior, and about the cornerstones of our experience - time, love, memory.
 
REAR FLAP: Jonathan Weiner worked as a writer and editor at The Sciences. He is the author of Planet Earth, The Next One Hundred Years, and The Beak of the Finch, which won both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. During the writing of Time, Love, Memory he was Visiting Fellow in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University, and then McGraw Professor in Writing. He lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, with his wife and their two sons.
 


 
 Dust-jacket illustration
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(164 KBytes)

BOOK PRICE
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PRIMARY FOCUS: Rosalind Franklin and DNA

 
Rosalind Franklin The Dark Lady of DNA

Author: Brenda Maddox © 2002
Format: Paperback. Size: about 12.9cm W x 19.7cm H x 2.3cm T. Pages: xix + 380. Bibliography. Index.
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers, United Kingdom.
ISBN: 0-00-655211-0
Status: New

Contents page

Rear cover notes about this book:
'A most moving and important biography, as well as an impressive account of a major event in the history of science' Lewis Wolpert, Literary Review.
 
Although Rosalind Franklin took the crucial photograph of DNA revealing its double-helix structure, her work was overlooked when, four years after her death, three men - Maurice Wilkins of King's College London, Francis Crick of the Cavendish Laboratory and James Watson of Cambridge - were awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA.
 
In this compelling biography of Franklin, Brenda Maddox tells the story of a remarkably single-minded, forthright and tempestuous young woman, who at the age of fifteen decided that she wanted to be a scientist but who was airbrushed out of the greatest scientific discovery of the twentieth century.
 
'Maddox is a dab hand at drawing a heroine out from behind the long shadows cast by men and her Franklin appears as a determined, combative woman - a perfectionist who is plagued with self-doubt' Vanessa Thorpe, Observer.
 
'This magnificent biography gives a gripping yet nuanced account that resists the stock story-line of Franklin as the wronged heroine. What really happened is far more intriguing.' Gail Vines, Independent.
 
'An exhilerating and vivid tale of scientific and personal politics at a time of rapid change in British science.' Jane Gregory, New Scientist.
 
'A joy to read' Terence Kealey, Sunday Telegraph.

About the author, page i:
Brenda Maddox is an award-winning biographer whose work has been translated into ten languages. Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce, won the Los Angeles Times Biography Award, the Silver PEN Award, the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and was shortlisted for the National Book Award. Her life of D.H. Lawrence won the Whitbread Biography Award in '974 and George's Ghosts, on the married life of W.B. Yeats, was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 1998. She has been Home Affairs Editor on the Economist, has served as chairman of the Association of British Science Writers and is a member of the Royal Society's Science and Society Committee. She lives in London and mid-Wales.
 


 
By the same author:
Beyond Babel
The Half-Parent: Living with Other People's Children
Who's Afraid of Elizabeth Taylor?
The Marrying Kind
Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce
The Married Man: A Life of D.H Lawrence
George's Ghosts: A New Life of W.B. Yeats
 

 
 Front cover
image by Vittorio Luzzati
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BOOK PRICE
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£8.00 + £2.16 = £10.16
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£8.00 + £5.72 = £13.72
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JEWISH SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY BOOKS
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