Book Alert / A Guinea Pig's History Of Biology

A Guinea Pig's History of Biology by Jim Endersby, Harvard UP '08, $27.95, 499 pages, ISBN #0674027132. Index, bibliography, sources  and notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

And the 2008 Nobel Prize for Biology goes to.....the guinea pig. A heraldic award to a rodent? University of Sussex historian Jim Endersby might just cast such a vote, arguing that science has learned as much from the guinea pig, the fruit fly, corn, zebra fish, and the evening primrose as we take away from those senescent biologists whom the Nobel committee wines and dines each year at Oslo.

Not that Watson and Crick and company weren't hugely important in the march from complete ignorance to being able to buy simple genetic tests on the internet. But they and their colleagues did it on the backs of some flora and fauna who can't stand up to take a bow. So here's a shout out to them and an opportunity to learn from them a few lessons.

Endersby cites Robert Kohler's Lords of the Fly as a book that relates scientific history "in a  highly original way -- by making the fruit flies the heroes of his tale, rather than the geneticists who worked with them." The author argues that "A survey of some of the key organisms that have been used since Darwin's day illustrates how biological research itself has changed -- transforming the largely amateur practices of natural history into modern, laboratory-based molecular biology. It allows us  to trace the slow, uncertain path -- complete with diversions and dead ends -- that led us from the ancient world's understanding of inheritance to modern genetics."