Springer, 2013. — 191 p. — (Archimedes, Vol. 34) This is one of those biographies that provide a window onto the broader understanding of science in its social and cultural context. Using Sergei Nikolaevich Vinogradskii’s (1856-1953) career and scientific research trajectory as a point of entry, this book illustrates the manner in which microbiologists, chemists, botanists, and...
New York: NHP, 1964. — 179 p. — ISBN: 978-0313225833. Most introductory biology books throw a large collection of facts in your face without really giving you any explanation of how they came to be. What makes this so hard is that the heart of biology is about details. One way of putting this is - nomenclature (taxonomies) is to biology, as mathematics is to physics....
HarperCollionsPublishers Inc, USA, UK, 2016. — 176 p. — ISBN: 0062349589 Throughout his distinguished and unconventional career, engineer-turned-molecular-biologist Douglas Axe has been asking the questions that much of the scientific community would rather silence. Now, he presents his conclusions in this brave and pioneering book. Axe argues that the key to understanding our...
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. — 316 p. Including selected correspondence of R. A. Fisher with Leonard Darwin and others. This volume consists of a selection from R.A. Fisher's letters on natural selection, heredity, and eugenics, along with such comments and other material as are required for the elucidation of the correspondence and for giving continuity to the whole....
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018. — 368 p. Francis Willughby lived and thrived in the midst of the rapidly accelerating scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Traveling with his Cambridge tutor John Ray, they decided to overhaul the whole of natural history by imposing order on its messiness and complexity. It was exhilarating, exacting, and exhausting work. Yet before...
Baltomore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. — 375 p. If not for the work of his half cousin Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory might have met a somewhat different fate. In particular, with no direct evidence of natural selection and no convincing theory of heredity to explain it, Darwin needed a mathematical explanation of variability and heredity....
London: Parkstone Press, 2011. - 256 p. Reflecting their owner’s taste and serving as an impressive exhibition room for their visitors, cabinets of curiosities were a place of interest in the houses of the wealthy in the 16th an 17th centuries. Rare vegetable and animal species, fossils, those cabinets were always dedicated to science and knowledge. By collecting the most...
Pegasus Books, 2019. — 368 p. George Murray Levick was the physician on Robert Falcon Scott’s tragic Antarctic expedition of 1910. Marooned for an Antarctic winter, Levick passed the time by becoming the first man to study penguins up close. His findings were so shocking to Victorian morals that they were quickly suppressed and seemingly lost to history. A century later, Lloyd...
University of Chicago Press, 2009. — 166 p. In the years after the Revolutionary War, the fledgling republic of America was viewed by many Europeans as a degenerate backwater, populated by subspecies weak and feeble. Chief among these naysayers was the French Count and world-renowned naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, who wrote that the flora and fauna of America...
Leiden: Brill, 2014. — 522 p. — ISBN10: 9004268235; ISBN13: 978-9004268234. This volume tries to map out the intriguing amalgam of the different, partly conflicting approaches that shaped early modern zoology. Early modern reading of the Book of Nature comprised, among others, the description of species in the literary tradition of antiquity, as well as empirical observations,...
BRILL, 2007. - 700 p. In this volume, specialists from various disciplines (Neo-Latin, French, German, Dutch, History, History of Science, Art History) explore the fascinating early modern discourses on animals in science, literature and the visual arts.
Reidel, 1982. - 191 p. This monograph offers a case study of a central episode within the larger history of the transformation of natural history. Ornithology emerged as one of the first zoological disciplines during the fragmentation of natural history. It was a discipline that attracted considerable attention and support, and it was the setting for major theoretical debates...
Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003. — 653 p. Jean Fernel (1497-1558) was one of the foremost medical writers of his day, ranked by his contemporaries alongside Andreas Vesalius, reformer of anatomical studies, and Paracelsus, radical reformer of theories of disease and treatment. He is arguably the leading expositor of the Galenic system of medicine. He...
IOP Publishing Ltd, 2001. — 621 p. A witty illustrative dictionary, a conditional analogue of our “Physicists are joking.” In these days of ever-increasing specialization, it is important to gain a broad appreciation of the subject. With this in mind, Naturally Speaking: A Dictionary of Quotations on Biology, Botany, Nature and Zoology, Second Edition presents the largest...
Oxford University Press, 2015. - 215 p. Since the time of Aristotle, there had been a clear divide between the three kingdoms of animal, vegetable, and mineral. But by the eighteenth century, biological experiments, and the wide range of new creatures coming to Europe from across the world, challenged these neat divisions. Abraham Trembley found that freshwater polyps grew into...
University of Chicago Press, 2015. - 344 p. The Courtiers' Anatomists is about dead bodies and live animals in Louis XIV's Paris-and the surprising links between them. Examining the practice of seventeenth-century anatomy, Anita Guerrini reveals how anatomy and natural history were connected through animal dissection and vivisection. Driven by an insatiable curiosity, Parisian...
Facts on File, Inc., USA, 2007. — 369 p. — ISBN: 0816055300 Around 1900, a handful of European biologists conducted groundbreaking research that reshaped the way general heredity and biological evolution was viewed. Leading the way in this exciting field, Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, studied the patterns of inherited physical traits for more than 20 years before his work...
Springer, 2002. - 332 p. The present book, although written mainly for science students and research scientists, is also aimed at those readers who look at science, not for its own sake, but in search of a better understanding of our world in general. What were the fundamental questions asked by the early pioneers of molecular biology? What made them tick for decades, trying to...
University of Chicago Press, 2015. - 388 p. Pictures from the past powerfully shape current views of the world. In books, television programs, and websites, new images appear alongside others that have survived from decades ago. Among the most famous are drawings of embryos by the Darwinist Ernst Haeckel in which humans and other vertebrates begin identical, then diverge toward...
University of Kentucky Press, 2009. — 108 p. Kentucky attracted an amazing variety of would-be settlers in pioneer days, but none with brighter talent than John James Audubon. Although his years in the state came long before publication of the monumental Birds of America, he was already painting the scenes from nature that were to make him famous. "Audubon: The Kentucky Years"...
World Scientific, 2003. - 178 p. This book is about four great pioneers of medical microbiology — Emil von Behring, Robert Koch, Paul Ehrlich and Elie Metchnikoff — and their scientific contributions. They were all awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. Thus, it may be of interest to see what impression their discoveries have made on contemporary science and...
World Scientific, 2005. - 161 p. This popular account of the history of ferment takes the reader on a fascinating journey from its obscure origins in medieval medicine and alchemy to the modern concept of the enzyme. During the 19th century, the question of the nature of the ferment led to a long and bitter conflict between those that believed in a vital force peculiar to the...
Reidel, 1982. - 314 p. In the early nineteenth century, a group of German biologists led by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and Karl Friedrich Kielmeyer initiated a search for laws of biological organization that would explain the phenomena of form and function and establish foundations for a unified theory of life. The tradition spawned by these efforts found its most important...
Springer, 2015. — 90 p. This book gives a concise history of biophysics in contemporary China, from about 1949 to 1976. It outlines how a science specialty evolved from an ambiguous and amorphous field into a fully-fledged academic discipline in the socio-institutional contexts of contemporary China. The book relates how, while initially consisting of cell biologists, the...
With a Foreword by Sir David Attenborough. — Brill, 2018. — 999 p. Interposed between the natural world in all its diversity and the edited form in which we encounter it in literature, imagery and the museum, lie the multiple practices of the naturalists in selecting, recording and preserving the specimens from which our world view is to be reconstituted. The factors that weigh...
Cambridge University Press, NY, USA, 2017. — 442 p. — ISBN: 978-1-107-12996-2. This book has its origins in conversations that I had with Rashmi Dyal Chand, my friend and colleague at Northeastern University School of Law. Several years ago, in her role as research director for our faculty, Rashmi encouraged me to organize a conference on a topic related to my scholarship. With...
New York: Routlefge, 2019. — 233 p. During the twentieth century, genes were considered the controlling force of life processes, and the transfer of DNA the definitive explanation for biological heredity. Such views shaped the politics of human heredity: in the eugenic era, controlling heredity meant intervening in the distribution of "good" and "bad" genes. However, since the...
Springer, 2019. — 204 p. — (Springer Biographies) This book sheds light on a little-known aspect of the Imperial family of Japan: For three generations, members of the family have devoted themselves to biological research. Emperor Showa (Hirohito) was an expert on hydrozoans and slime molds. His son, Emperor Akihito, is an ichthyologist specializing in gobioid fishes, and his...
Chelsea Green Publishing, 2009. — 272 p. Three astounding women scientists have in recent years penetrated the jungles of Africa and Borneo to observe, nurture, and defend humanity's closest cousins. Jane Goodall has worked with the chimpanzees of Gombe for nearly 50 years; Diane Fossey died in 1985 defending the mountain gorillas of Rwanda; and Biruté Galdikas lives in...
MIT Press, 2016. — 472 p. Investigations of how the understanding of heredity developed in scientific, medical, agro-industrial, and political contexts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book examines the wide range of scientific and social arenas in which the concept of inheritance gained relevance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries....
MIT Press, 2007. - 496 p. Until the middle of the eighteenth century, the biological makeup of an organism was ascribed to an individual instance of "generation" - involving conception, pregnancy, embryonic development, parturition, lactation, and even astral influences and maternal mood - rather than the biological transmission of traits and characteristics. Discussions of...
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017. — 359 p. This is the first history of phytotrons, huge climate-controlled laboratories that enabled plant scientists to experiment on the environmental causes of growth and development of living organisms. Made possible by computers and other modern technologies of the early Cold War, such as air conditioning and humidity...
Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 2014. — 404 p. Many advances in medicine and surgery can be directly linked to improvements in understanding the structure and function of the human body. During the sixteenth century, the study of human anatomy became an objective discipline, based on direct observation and scientific principles. Not surprisingly, the study of human anatomy has...
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017. — 352 p. As scientists debated the nature of life in the nineteenth century, two theories predominated: vitalism, which suggested that living things contained a “vital spark,” and mechanism, the idea that animals and humans differed from nonliving things only in their degree of complexity. Erik Peterson tells the forgotten story of the...
University of Chicago Press, 1996. - 190 p. Making PCR is the fascinating, behind-the-scenes account of the invention of one of the most significant biotech discoveries in our time — the polymerase chain reaction. Transforming the practice and potential of molecular biology, PCR extends scientists' ability to identify and manipulate genetic materials and accurately reproduces...
Springer International Publishing AG, 2018. — 295 p. — (Plant Cell Monographs 23). — ISBN: 3319699431. This book discusses central concepts and theories in cell biology from the ancient past to the 21st century, based on the premise that understanding the works of scientists like Hooke, Hofmeister, Caspary, Strasburger, Sachs, Schleiden, Schwann, Mendel, Nemec, McClintock, etc....
Springer International Publishing AG, 2018. — 295 p. — (Plant Cell Monographs 23). — ISBN: 3319699431. This book discusses central concepts and theories in cell biology from the ancient past to the 21st century, based on the premise that understanding the works of scientists like Hooke, Hofmeister, Caspary, Strasburger, Sachs, Schleiden, Schwann, Mendel, Nemec, McClintock, etc....
Oxford University Press, 2003. — 385 p. Genesis: The Evolution of Biology presents a history of the past two centuries of biology, suitable for use in courses, but of interest more broadly to evolutionary biologists, geneticists, and biomedical scientists, as well as general readers interested in the history of science. The book covers the early evolutionary biologists-Lamarck,...
New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. - 247 p. This book reconstructs the emergence of the phenomenon of "lost time" by engaging with two of the most significant time experts of the nineteenth century: the German physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz and the French writer Marcel Proust. Its starting point is the archival discovery of curve images that Helmholtz produced in the...
London: Printed for Nodder & Co.,1789. — 608 p. First of 24 volumes of «The Naturalist's Miscellany» bbeing a handbook of plants, animals and birds likewise. George Shaw (10 December 1751 – 22 July 1813) was an English botanist and zoologist. He took up the profession of medical practitioner. In 1786 he became the assistant lecturer in botany at Oxford University. He was a...
Oxford University Press, 2010. - 304 p. For modern scientists, history often starts with last week's journals and is regarded as largely a quaint interest compared with the advances of today. However, this book makes the case that, measured by major advances, the greatest decade in the history of brain studies was mid-twentieth century, especially the 1950s. The first to focus...
Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988. — 288 p. In the seventeenth century, a series of proposals and schemes for an artificial language intended to replace Latin as the international medium of communication gained currency. Fully developed, these schemes consisted of a classification of all known 'things' and a set of self-defining names designed to reflect the divisions of...
Milkweed Editions, 2014. — 393 p. John James Audubon is renowned for his masterpiece of natural history and art, "The Birds of America", the first nearly comprehensive survey of the continent’s birdlife. And yet few people understand, and many assume incorrectly, what sort of man he was. How did the illegitimate son of a French sea captain living in Haiti, who lied both about...
Milkweed Editions, 2014. — 393 p. John James Audubon is renowned for his masterpiece of natural history and art, "The Birds of America", the first nearly comprehensive survey of the continent’s birdlife. And yet few people understand, and many assume incorrectly, what sort of man he was. How did the illegitimate son of a French sea captain living in Haiti, who lied both about...
Academic Press, 1998 - 433 p. Product Description: This book is the second volume of autobiographical essays by distinguished senior neuroscientists it is part of the first collection of neuroscience writing that is primarily autobiographical. As neuroscience is a young discipline, the contributors to this volume are truly pioneers of scientific research on the brain and spinal...
Wiley-Blackwell, 2018. — 328 p. — ISBN: 978-1-118-52431-2. Knowledge of human anatomy has not always been an essential component of medical education and practice. Most European medical schools did not emphasize anatomy in their curricula until the post-Renaissance era; current knowledge was largely produced between the 16th and 20th centuries. Although not all cultures...
CRC Press, 2018. — 428 p. — (Species and Systematics). — ISBN10: 1138055743, ISBN13: 978-1138055742. Over time the complex idea of "species" has evolved, yet its meaning is far from resolved. This comprehensive work is a fresh look at an idea central to the field of biology by tracing its history from antiquity to today. Species is a benchmark exploration and clarification of a...
University of Chicago Press, 2018. — 523 p. The emergence of biology as a distinct science in the eighteenth century has long been a subject of scholarly controversy. Michel Foucault, on the one hand, argued that its appearance only after 1800 represented a fundamental rupture with the natural history that preceded it, marking the beginnings of modernity. Ernst Mayr, on the...
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