The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology

"What guides all my choices is a combination of scholarship and storytelling. Really digging into the subject area, unearthing new insights—great biography or whatever it might be—but then telling a hell of a good story. You can just admire Judson as a great work of history because he interviewed so many people. It’s really the definitive history of the birth of molecular biology. He stitched together this narrative of all these folks who were trying to understand the secrets of life at the molecular level. What makes the difference between life and non-life? Those first questions that people were asking. Discovering the double helix, and cracking the genetic code, things like that. It was a fascinating era. This was science done by a small number of people, not the large enterprises we have today. Funding was scarce, collaboration was common. Most of these folks were derailed by World War II, they had to be doing other things before they got back to their research. You get a sense of the epic sweep of where we went from blind ignorance about life at the molecular level to being on the verge of manipulating it ourselves through genetic engineering, in just a couple of decades. “What’s different about the birth of molecular biology is the discoveries being so crystal clear. One day we were in the dark about heredity, something as fundamental as how life makes life, and the next day it was phenomenally clear.” He gave those people long paragraphs to say what they said. I’ve seen some of the original transcripts of the interviews. He did not have a heavy hand in the editing of what people had to say. That could be dangerous, but on the other hand, it does make the book a definitive contribution in terms of all these people going on the record about what they did, what they were thinking, who did what, how we know what we know. As the years pass, this book is going to have a long, long utility because it stands out as a great record of this incredible era in biology. You could go back to Darwin’s time for ideas that were revolutionary, that triggered a big transformation in worldview. What’s different about the birth of molecular biology is the discoveries being so crystal clear. One day we were in the dark about heredity, something as fundamental as how life makes life, and the next day it was phenomenally clear. Those are pretty hard revolutions to match. There have been great bursts in various parts of biology since then but whatever unit of measurement you have for revolutions, this was a big one."