Sunday science book corner…
Sort of outsourced to Boyce Rensberger.
As I see this blog, it’s about science as it intersects with public life with a strong strand of history running through it, and occasional commentaries on the writing of science for the public as a sort of meta-coverage. Of late, politics more or less connected to science stories have dominated — and that’s likely to go on, given the season. But I don’t want to lose sight of the other stuff, so this week I plan to write at least a few notices of recent popular science books worth noting. Here, I thought I’d offer a Sunday kind of retrospective on some of the old good stuff worth remembering. Hence, my turn to Boyce, my already-missed MIT colleague.
Boyce, for those of you who don”t have the privilege of his acquaintance, is the just-retired director of the Knight Science Journalism fellows program at MIT.
(For those of you who don’t know about this program and are mid-career science writers, check it out. It offers one year at MIT, a decent stipend, and no requirements other than the twice weekly seminars during which leading researchers in the area come and talk to y’all for a couple of hours. In other words, it’s a really, really good gig.)
Boyce has also taken on most of the available roles known to science writing: daily newspaper reporter and editor; magazine writer and editor; kids science tv writer; book author — all before he became one of the leading educators of science writers through his work at the Knight Program. (For a quick intro to what matters to him, read this.)
Along the way he came up with this: a list of the books that, in his humble opinion, every science writer should read.
I never take such lists all that seriously, and I would surely make a somewhat different selection if I were ever tempted to canonize. But leaving aside such quibbles, it is true that at least all the books on the list that I have read (most, but not all) have done me good.
All of this is preamble to the suggestion that occurred to me when I made a recent return to Boyce’s list:
A really good read would put together Schroedinger’s What is Life with Watson’s The Double Helix. I’m not sure if the impact of Schroedinger’s brief book is remembered all that much these days, but it was hugely influential — Francis Crick, for one, credited his turn to biology to an encounter with it, and its worth reading because it demonstrated the power of disciplined thinking to define a problem. Schroedinger was, of course, a physicist who got interested in biology late in life; he focused on the question of inheritance with variation, as the chief outstanding issue biology had to solve next. Most impressive, with almost no data, he managed to anticipate several of the major developments in biology to come over the next couple of decades.
The most important of which, of course, was Watson and Crick’s identification of the structure of DNA molecule. Watson’s book doesn’t need any introduction — and, with my family connection to Rosalind Franklin, I can’t say I think Watson’s account of her can be taken as anything but his own more or less fictional creation.
But the juxtaposition of the Schroedinger and Watson account is great fun, and illustrative of two poles of science writing. Schroedinger’s is formal, analytical — and invitation to take part in the intellectual life of science. Watson, though he would probably hate to hear this description, takes a truly humanist approach to presenting the inner life of science to a lay audience. He spends an enormous amount of time on what it feels like to do science; while you certainly learn the basic story of DNA and the significance of its structure, his account of the making of modern biology is all about the people, most of all, of course, the man Peter Medawar called “Lucky Jim.”
Put ‘em back to back, and see what you think.
Image: Andreas Praefcke, “Basement shelves, Firestone Library, Princeton,” 2007. Source Wikimedia Commons
Tags: Erwin Schroedinger, good books, James Watson, Knight Fellows, science writing
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