A Guinea Pig's History of Biology » (New Edition)

Dr. Jim Endersby is a lecturer in the History Department at the University of Sussex. He was most recently an affiliated lecturer in the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University.

"Endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved," Darwin famously concluded The Origin of Species, and for confirmation we look to...the guinea pig? How this curious creature and others as humble (and as fast-breeding) have helped unlock the mystery of inheritance is the unlikely story Jim Endersby tells in this book.

Biology today promises everything from better foods or cures for common diseases to the alarming prospect of redesigning life itself. Looking at the organisms that have made all this possible gives us a new way of understanding how we got here—and perhaps of thinking about where we're going. Instead of a history of which great scientists had which great ideas, this story of passionflowers and hawkweeds, of zebra fish and viruses, offers a bird's (or rodent's) eye view of the work that makes science possible.

Mixing the celebrities of genetics, like the fruit fly, with forgotten players such as the evening primrose, the book follows the unfolding history of biological inheritance from Aristotle's search for the "universal, absolute truth of fishiness" to the apparently absurd speculations of eighteenth-century natural philosophers to the spectacular findings of our day—which may prove to be the absurdities of tomorrow.

The result is a quirky, enlightening, and thoroughly engaging perspective on the history of heredity and genetics, tracing the slow, uncertain path—complete with entertaining diversions and dead ends—that led us from the ancient world's understanding of inheritance to modern genetics.

The Barnes & Noble Review

The incredible intellectual journey from Charles Darwin's first experiments with orchids and passionflowers -- starting in 1854 as he sought to unriddle the elements of heredity -- to the patenting of the world first transgenic animal, OncoMouse, in 1988, is an intense and exciting voyage of discovery whose fascinating zigzags, cul-de-sacs, and milestones have seldom been charted in a more entertaining fashion than in Jim Endersby's A Guinea Pig's History of Biology. Endersby's unique narrative hook is to organize his chapters around some previously unsung "heroes": the various humble plants, animals, and microbes that have been the focus of innumerable scientific investigations into the secrets of genetics, and which have generously, although sometimes grudgingly, yielded their secrets to a small army of master, journeyman, and apprentice researchers, all of whom emerge as vivid personalities through his lucid prose. This authorial conceit provides a sturdy armature on which to affix everything from biography to cultural analysis to literary exegesis to sociopolitical musings, but Endersby never allows his hook to interfere with a good anecdote or a brilliant schematic of the way science and biology really work. Combining the same taste for eccentrics and oddities associated with historian of magic Ricky Jay with the rationalist, layman-favoring clarity of biologist Stephen Jay Gould, Endersby does honor to the quagga, the zebrafish, the mouse-ear cress, the fruit fly, and a handful of other species. Like James Burke in his show Connections, Endersby startles with his account of historical serendipity that ultimately proves almost magically inevitable. --Paul DiFilippo

Preface and acknowledgements ix

1 Equus quagga and Lord Morton's mare 1

2 Passiflora gracilis: Inside Darwin's greenhouse 29

3 Homo sapiens: Francis Galton's fairground attraction 61

4 Hieracium auricula: What Mendel did next 95

5 Oenothera lamarckiana: Hugo de Vries led up the primrose path 128

6 Drosophila melanogaster: Bananas, bottles and Bolsheviks 170

7 Cavia porcellus: Mathematical guinea pigs 209

8 Bacteriophage: The virus that revealed DNA 251

9 Zea mays: Incorrigible corn 292

10 Arabidopsis thaliana: A fruit fly for the botanists 334

11 Danio rerio: Seeing through zebrafish 373

12 OncoMouse®: Engineering organisms 411

Bibliography, sources and notes 433

Index 483