Book Description

In The Logic of Life François Jacob looks at the way our understanding of biology has changed since the sixteenth century. He describes four fundamental turning points in the perception of the structure of living things: the discoveries of the functions of organs, cells, chromosomes and genes, and DNA.

Amazon.com
Molecular biology seems to crystallize our feelings about science. The promises and threats of knowledge are made plain as we peek around the corner and see genetic counseling, genome mapping, and cloning staring back at us. Pioneering researcher François Jacob--who shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for medicine--offers his thoughts on the past, present, and future of science in Of Flies, Mice & Men. As informal as a memoir, yet sharp and clever in its discussions of philosophy and politics, Jacob's book breaks new ground in popular-science publishing.

Not many scientists are comfortable quoting poets from Sophocles to Apollinaire, but Jacob weaves their words with his own beautiful prose to inspire the reader with new ways of thinking about science as a part of human life. His aim is not simply to retell the brief history of molecular biology but to put it in context and, more importantly, to show that this context is as important as the research itself. Jacob is one of the few scientists who recognize that science is easily abused, but that its course can't be stopped, or even slowed much. Rather than caving in to fatalism, he offers the hope that it can be guided, and he knows that a well-informed public is his best ally in this effort. The project is inspiring, if a little daunting; as he says, opening Pandora's box "condemned human beings to never-ending research." --Rob Lightner Book Description

Who could have guessed that the lowly fruit fly might hold the key for decoding heredity? Or that the mouse might one day disclose astonishing evolutionary secrets? In a book infused with wisdom, wonder, and a healthy dose of wry skepticism, Nobel Prize-winning geneticist François Jacob walks us through the surprising ways of science, particularly the science of biology, in this century. Of Flies, Mice, and Men is at once a work of history, a social study of the role of scientists in the modern world, and a cautionary tale of the bumbling and brilliance, imagination and luck, that attend scientific discovery. A book about molecules, reproduction, and evolutionary tinkering, it is also about the way biologists work, and how they contemplate beauty and truth, good and evil.

Animated with anecdotes from Greek mythology, literature, episodes from the history of science, and personal experience, Of Flies, Mice, and Men tells the story of how the marvelous discoveries of molecular and developmental biology are transforming our understanding of who we are and where we came from. In particular, Jacob scrutinizes the place of the scientist in society. Alternately cast as the soothsayer Tiresias, the conscienceless inventor Daedalus, or Prometheus, conveyer of dangerous knowledge, the scientist in our day must instead adopt the role of truthteller, Jacob suggests. And the crucial truth that molecular biology teaches is the one he elaborates with great clarity and grace in this book: that all animals are made of the same building blocks, by a combinatorial system that always rearranges the same elements according to new forms.

Customer Reviews (4)

Goes nowhere
I agree with the other reviews -- this book, by a Nobel Prize winner, no less, has a fascinating topic; yet, over and over, the author starts building up to a conclusion, and just as he's about to reach that conclusion and share the learned insights, he goes off on another path.
He also makes glaring mistakes about relativity and astronomy when he claims "that if you travel long enough and fast enough through the galaxies, you'll become young again" and "our entire world came into being in a few hundredths of a second."
Instead, very fast travel will make you age more slowly than your non-traveling and relatively fast-aging peers, but you won't "become young again," and the Earth was formed in a very slow process -- it was the initial Big Bang, not the creation of the Earth, that was fast.

Starkly Mediocre
Like music out of the romantic period, this book starts going nowhere, then promises to go somewhere, but ends up going nowhere.

The middle chapters talking about Lysenko and his anti-science... and the parts about genome research were interesting.

Neither fish nor fowl
Perhaps it's the translation, but this book dances around its point, andlacks coherence. It's meant, I think, to convey a sense of how it feels towork on science, particularly biological science, but it never really drawsus in. Written more as a series of independent essays, it turns out to benot all that memorable, and not all that interesting.

Easy to read, yet lacking the inefable
This book is nice to read. It has a wonderful chapter on good and evil, in which you are shown an array of new perspectives. However, it lacks a common argument. It nibbles here and there, without apparent coherence.Also, Jacob, as a research scientist, understandably seems to feel the needto quote someone to corroborate everything he says, which means that thebook quotes nearly everyone who's name is known, and these quotations lackrelevance and insight most of the time. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

As fresh today as it was twenty-five years ago
I happened on this gem the other day in my favorite used bookstore. I was looking for a french version of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, itself a wonderful little book by Jean Dominique Bauby, which I am reading in english. I failed, but did find Le Jeu des Possibles by François Jacob, Nobel prizewinner for his work on gene regulation in the 50s and 60s. It was published in France in 1981. In fewer than 120 pages of quite small format livre de poche, Jacob eloquently describes the essentials and implications of evolutionary (and molecular) biology. His language is very efficient and yet effortless, and his figures of speech are matchless. In three chapters - Myth and Science, Evolutionary Tinkering, and Time to Invent the Future - he summarizes most of what is worthwhile in many contemporary descendants, including Dan Dennett and Richard Dawkins, without shrinking from the controversies that they elaborated. It is awonderful little volume, as fresh today as it was revolutionary and prescient in 1981. Every sentence is to be cherished. Unfortunately, though it grew from conference presentations at the Weizmann Institute and at UC Berkeley, I believe it was never translated into English. More's the pity. It is even better than his popular biography, La Stature Internelle, which I also enjoyed when it appeared many years ago, and which is available in English. ... Read more

Book Description
Frontiers of Life addresses fields of biology in terms of their frontiers--that is, the areas that will demand the most work in this new century. Because of their standing, the editors have been able to unite the most prestigious and well-informed authorities to place recent scientific advances into the context of their effects on daily human experiences and expectations. They ask, "What frontiers of the biological sciences will constitute the challenges of the next century?" Their first answer is an understanding of the processes and mechanisms that led to the origin of life. They take this answer as the starting point of the first section of the Encyclopedia. They thus proceed throughout the four volumes.
Separating this Encyclopedia form others is its multidisciplinary approach to the "frontiers" theme. While other encyclopedias strive to describe the past and present states of many subjects, Frontiers of Life offers the insights of world-class scientists into their subjects' growth areas.

Key Features
* Includes Advisory Board with each member a Nobel Laureate
* Written by contributors playing leading roles in their fields of expertise
* Contains almost 3,000 full color tables and figures, illustrating the 205 articles; color running heads and subtitles within each article make reading easy
* Presents biology as an organizing force of life in every article, from the cellular level to the interpersonal ... Read more