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277 books match the query 'Biology' and 5 start with h

cover of Hormones, Heredity, and Race: Spectacular Failure in Interwar Vienna

Hormones, Heredity, and Race

Spectacular Failure in Interwar Vienna

Cheryl A. Logan

Rutgers University Press, 2013

Early in the twentieth century, arguments about “nature” and “nurture” pitted a rigid genetic determinism against the idea that genes were flexible and open to environmental change. This book tells the story of three Viennese biologists—Paul Kammerer, Julius Tandler, and Eugen Steinach—who sought to show how the environment could shape heredity through the impact of hormones. It also explores the dynamic of failure through both scientific and social lenses. During World War I, the three men were well respected scientists; by 1934, one was dead by his own hand, another was in exile, and the third was subject to ridicule.

Paul Kammerer had spent years gathering  zoological evidence on whether environmental change could alter heredity, using his research as the scientific foundation for a new kind of eugenics—one that challenged the racism growing in mainstream eugenics. By 1918, he drew on the pioneering research of two colleagues who studied how secretions shaped sexual attributes to argue that hormones could alter genes. After 1920, Julius Tandler employed a similar concept to restore the health and well-being of Vienna's war-weary citizens. Both men rejected the rigidly acting genes of the new genetics and instead crafted a biology of flexible heredity to justify eugenic reforms that respected human rights. But the interplay of science and personality with the social and political rise of fascism and with antisemitism undermined their ideas, leading to their spectacular failure.
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cover of How Life Began: Evolution's Three Geneses

How Life Began

Evolution's Three Geneses

Alexandre Meinesz

University of Chicago Press, 2008

The origin of life is a hotly debated topic. The Christian Bible states that God created the heavens and the Earth, all in about seven days roughly six thousand years ago. This episode in Genesis departs markedly from scientific theories developed over the last two centuries which hold that life appeared on Earth about 3.5 billion years ago in the form of bacteria, followed by unicellular organisms half a millennia later. It is this version of genesis that Alexandre Meinesz explores in this engaging tale of life's origins and evolution.
 
How Life Began elucidates three origins, or geneses, of life—bacteria, nucleated cells, and multicellular organisms—and shows how evolution has sculpted life to its current biodiversity through four main events—mutation, recombination, natural selection, and geologic cataclysm. As an ecologist who specializes in algae, the first organisms to colonize Earth, Meinesz brings a refreshingly novel voice to the history of biodiversity and emphasizes here the role of unions in organizing life. For example, the ingestion of some bacteria by other bacteria led to mitochondria that characterize animal and plant cells, and the chloroplasts of plant cells.
 
As Meinesz charmingly recounts, life’s grandeur is a result of an evolutionary tendency toward sociality and solidarity. He suggests that it is our cohesion and collaboration that allows us to solve the environmental problems arising in the decades and centuries to come. Rooted in the science of evolution but enlivened with many illustrations from other disciplines and the arts, How Life Began intertwines the rise of bacteria and multicellular life with Vermeer’s portrait of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, the story of Genesis and Noah, Meinesz’s son’s early experiences with Legos, and his own encounters with other scientists. All of this brings a very human and humanistic tone to Meinesz’s charismatic narrative of the three origins of life.
 
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cover of How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology

How Life Works

A User’s Guide to the New Biology

Philip Ball

University of Chicago Press, 2023

“Bold and intriguing.”—Wall Street Journal • “Penetrating. . . . Provocative and profound.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) • “Offers plenty of food for thought.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
 
“Ball’s marvelous book is both wide-ranging and deep. . . . I could not put it down.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Song of the Cell and the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Emperor of All Maladies

A new, cutting-edge vision of biology that revises our understanding of what life itself is, how to enhance it, and what possibilities it offers.
 
Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works—the idea of the genome as a blueprint, of genes as instructions for building an organism, of proteins as precisely tailored molecular machines, of cells as entities with fixed identities, and more—have been exposed as incomplete, misleading, or wrong.
 
In How Life Works, Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. Ball explains that there is no unique place to look for an answer to this question: life is a system of many levels—genes, proteins, cells, tissues, and body modules such as the immune system and the nervous system—each with its own rules and principles. How Life Works explains how these levels operate, interface, and work together (most of the time).
 
With this knowledge come new possibilities. Today we can redesign and reconfigure living systems, tissues, and organisms. We can reprogram cells, for instance, to carry out new tasks and grow into structures not seen in the natural world. As we discover the conditions that dictate the forms into which cells organize themselves, our ability to guide and select the outcomes becomes ever more extraordinary. Some researchers believe that ultimately we will be able to regenerate limbs and organs, and perhaps even create new life forms that evolution has never imagined.
 
Incorporating the latest research and insights, How Life Works is a sweeping journey into this new frontier of the life sciences, a realm that will reshape our understanding of life as we know it.
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cover of How to Find a Martian: A Fossil Hunter’s Guide to the Red Planet

How to Find a Martian

A Fossil Hunter’s Guide to the Red Planet

Sean McMahon

University of Chicago Press, 2027

Join today’s search for signs of alien life in fossil remains from prehistoric Mars, an Earth-like world that glittered with rivers, lakes, and deep blue seas.

Billions of years ago, there was another Earth in our solar system: the temperate and blue-streaked world of ancient Mars. Today, the rocky ruins of that lost world offer our best hope of finding signs of alien life. In How to Find a Martian, astrobiologist and paleontologist Sean McMahon argues that we may soon find fossils on Mars—perhaps even in our lifetime.

There are now thousands of astrobiologists around the world, using the tools of modern science to answer some of the most profound, intellectually exciting questions that have ever been asked: What is life? How does it evolve and proliferate across vast spans of space and time, and what forms might it take on alien worlds? The search for life on Mars is a mainstay of this research program, and it has never been more advanced, more sophisticated, or better funded than it is today. Although scientists have not yet found fossils on Mars, astrobiologist Sean McMahon says, we have at least learned how to find them. We now know which regions and landscapes on Mars could once have supported life and preserved its remains in rocks and minerals. We know how the remains of living organisms can end up woven into the texture of ancient rocks, transmuted into minerals or transcribed into the subtle language of fossil carbon molecules. But we have also learned to be cautious—and not to be fooled when non-living nature imitates the patterns of life. 

Accessibly explaining trailblazing ideas and findings in astronomy, geology, microbiology, and paleontology, McMahon makes a persuasive and alluring case that we have the tools, ideas, methods, and missions to find past life on Mars. 

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cover of Hunger: The Biology and Politics of Starvation

Hunger

The Biology and Politics of Starvation

John R. Butterly and Jack Shepherd

Dartmouth College Press, 2010

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, recognizes the individual’s right “to a standard of living adequate for the health and wellbeing of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing, and medical care.” More than sixty years later, despite the rapid advancement of science and technology and the proliferation of humanitarian efforts, inadequate nutrition remains a major health and social problem worldwide. Food insecurity—chronic malnutrition, persistent hunger, even starvation—still afflicts more than one in seven of the world’s people. As Butterly and Shepherd show, hunger is not the result of inadequate resources and technologies; rather, its cause is a lack of political will to ensure that all people have access to the food to which they are entitled—food distributed safely, fairly, and equitably. Using a cross-disciplinary approach rooted in both medicine and social science to address this crucial issue, the authors provide in-depth coverage of the biology of human nutrition; malnutrition and associated health-related factors; political theories of inadequate nutrition and famine; historical-political behaviors that have led to famine in the past; and the current political behaviors that cause hunger and malnutrition to remain a major health problem today.
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