Dreamers, Visionaries, and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences

Harman Oren, Dietrich Michael R.

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 the Author

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 co-editor of "Rebels, Mavericks, and Heretics in Biology". He lives in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Michael R. Dietrich is a professor in the History and Philosophy of Science Department at the University of Pittsburgh and co-editor of "The Educated Eye" and "Rebels, Mavericks, and Heretics in Biology".

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