The Story of Life Great Discoveries in Biology

About this book

A unique opportunity for students to learn biology through stories told by one of the great science storytellers of our time: Sean B. Carroll. This enriching text follows the structure of an introductory biology course, with brief chapters that span the breadth of the life sciences. This gives maximum flexibility to assign a few stories, or all of them.

Contents

Preface: Why Stories? (Storytelling is a powerful but underutilized way of learning science; why the particular stories in this book were selected.)

I.  The Process of Science (How the scientific process works, and what can happen when it is undermined.)
1.  Guts and Glory (Robin Warren’s and Barry Marshall’s revolutionary discovery and unorthodox demonstration that H. pylori is the cause of ulcers.)
2.  First Do No Harm (Do vaccines cause autism? The story of the physician who raised the alarm about a link between vaccination and autism, and then how that claim has been tested and affected vaccination rates across the world.)

II.  Heredity (How does like produce like? The stories of three seminal discoveries that revealed the physical basis of heredity, and the strides being made today to correct human disorders with gene therapy.)
3.  Like Beads on a Necklace (Where does genetic information reside? The story of T.H. Morgan and collaborators’ experiments in fruit flies that proved the chromosomal basis of heredity.)
4.  Who Would Have Guessed it? (Frederick Griffith and Oswald Avery’s experiments in bacteria that culminated in the key evidence that DNA is the chemical basis of heredity.)
5.  The Secret of Life (James Watson and Francis Crick’s bold and ultimately successful quest to solve the structure of DNA that revealed how genetic information could be faithfully replicated from generation to generation, and evolve by mutation.)
6.  Genes as Medicine (The story of Jean Bennett and Albert Maguire’s quest to correct blindness with gene therapy.)

III.  Evolution and the Origins of Biological Diversity (Evolution is said to be the biggest idea humans ever conceived. This section presents the stories of several pioneers who first illuminated key chapters in the story of life, and the origins of species, cells, animals, and humans.)
7.  Great Minds Think Alike (The epic journeys of Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace, and the similar patterns of observations that lead them to independently propose the theory of evolution by natural selection.)
8.  An Explosion of Animals (When and why did animal life first flourish? Charles Walcott’s discovery of a huge deposit of fossils in the Canadian Rockies that document the so-called “Cambrian Explosion” of animal life over 500 million years ago.)
9.  Evolution by Merger (How did complex eukaryotic cells evolve? The story of the radical theory championed by Lynn Margulis that eukaryotic organelles arose from symbiotic bacteria.)
10.  A Third Form of Life (The stunning discovery by Carl Woese and colleagues of the Archaea, an entire domain of life that was overlooked by biologists for decades.)
11.  Queen of the Stone Age (The adventures of Mary and Louis Leakey, whose discoveries of early hominids at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania demonstrated that Africa is the cradle of humanity.)
12.  A Little Bit of Neanderthal in Many of Us (The stunning discovery by Svante Pääbo and colleagues that many people retain a trace of Neanderthal ancestry in their DNA.)

IV.  Ecology (How does nature work? This section features some of the first experimental approaches to ecology that revealed surprising truths about the factors that shape ecosystems and the environment, and that are the scientific foundation for modern environmental stewardship.)
13.  You Are Who You Eat (The adventures of Charles Elton, who described the first food chains, revealed how food is the currency in the economy of nature, and founded modern ecology. )
14.  Why Is the World Green? (Robert Paine’s pioneering experiments that overturned thinking about the roles of predators in communities, and spurred new conservation strategies.)
15.  A Rule of Thumb (To Save the World) (What determines how many species live in a given place? The story of E.O. Wilson and Daniel Simberloff’s experimental test of the theory of island biogeography, and its application to conservation.)
16.  The Future of Life on a Hockey Stick (The discovery by Charles Keeling of the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere, and the potential consequences for the planet.)

V. Physiology and Medicine (How do the body’s complex organs and systems function? The mysteries of development, immunity, and the brain have been penetrated by a few seminal experiments and discoveries, with profound implications for medicine.)
17.Unleashing Potential (The surprising demonstration by John Gurdon that mature somatic cells can be reprogrammed to generate a cloned animal, and Shinya Yamanaka’s discovery of the molecular recipe for reprogramming.)
18. The Arsenal of Immunity (How does the body mount a specific immune response to any and all foreign invaders? The story of Susuma Tonegawa’s discovery of the molecular basis of antibody diversity.)
19.Everyone Has a Split Personality (How does the brain work? The story of Roger Sperry’s pioneering studies of human split-brain patients and his discovery of the different roles of left and right hemispheres.)

Customer Reviews

Biography

Sean B. Carroll is professor of genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His first book, Endless Forms Most Beautiful, was a finalist for the 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Carroll's seminal scientific work has been featured in Time and The New Yorker. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.