book review

Visions of mimicking, synthesising, or designing life forms have an ancient pedigree, bouncing back and forth between the occult, the philosophical, and the scientific. Artists working with the tools of science and technology have also played a key role in shaping and interrogating imaginations of creation – and in revealing the way that tools shape the […]

My new bedtime reading is made of dramatic stuff. It is about children with dangerously high fevers, about parents fearing for the life of their offspring, and about healthy maids milking cows. It is about the enthusiastic joy of getting closer to immortality and the birth of fears so great that people turn their backs […]

We are usually covering contemporary biomedicine on display on this blog, but sometimes older stuff gets its way into this column as well. The occasion today is to draw attention to John Harley Warner and Jim Edmondson’s wonderfully illustrated book Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in America, 1880-1930, which has received very good […]

In an earlier post, I summarized the fascinating autobiographical story behind Harvard biotech professor David Edwards’s new experimental institution, Le Laboratoire in Paris. In his recent book Artscience (Harvard University Press 2008), Edwards tells about his education, how he was swamped with money after a short but succesful career as a biotech inventor, and how he was decent enough to use it for good and visionary […]

Yesterday I wrote about my experience of visiting Le Laboratoire in Paris. In Chapter 6 of his recent book Artscience (2008) the founder, David Edwards, explains the background for his art-science center. The son of a chemist, David was trained as a chemical engineer, then continued to graduate school where he did theoretical fluid mechanics. After […]

Most autobiographies of scientists are terribly boring—soulless accumulations of facts of hardly any interest for others than the near family combined with humourless vindications of the author’s inflated ego—best used as temporary cures against insomnia. When I bought Craig Venter’s A Life Decoded (Viking 2007) more than half a year ago I didn’t have high […]

I haven’t read Daniel Miller‘s recently published The Comfort of Things (Polity Press, 2008) yet, but his own presentation of the book in today’s Material World promises an extra-ordinary interesting reading experience for anyone interested in the use of ‘particulars’ (unique, anecdotal, idiosyncratic, singular, curious, etc. things) in museum practice. The Comfort of Things is composed […]

It took the local university bookstore for ever to get my copy of famous molecular geneticist James D. Watson’s Avoid Boring People. Lessons from a Life in Science (Knopf 2007) ordered and shipped – so apologies for this late review. Like biographies, autobiographies are written and read for a multitude of purposes, from trying to settle priority […]