Volume 21, Number 19 · November 28, 1974
The Mystery of the Libidinous Molecule
By C.H. Waddington
Life: The Unfinished Experiment
by S.E. Luria
Scribner's, 167 pp., $2.95 (paper)
Animal Architecture
by Karl von Frisch, with the collaboration of Otto von Frisch, translated by Lisbeth Gombrich
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 306, 282 illustrations pp., $12.95
The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology-Watcher
by Lewis Thomas
Viking, 153 pp., $6.95
Nobody can accuse the great pioneers of molecular biology of being mere Ivory Tower specialists, unwilling to emerge from their laboratories to tell us their thoughts about the general significance of the advances in our understanding of living systems which their work has brought about. Salvador Luria, who in 1969 shared a Nobel Prize for his part in 'The Virus Group' which laid so many of the foundations of molecular biology, is the latest in a line that includes Francis Crick, James Watson, Jacques Monod, and François Jacob. In a review of the books of the last two, I distinguished between 'hard-line' and 'soft-line' biologists. Monod, I suggested, belongs to the former type, Jacob tends toward the latter. Both are, of course, 'materialists' in some sense of that obscure word, but the hard-liners give the impression that it is enough to say that 'life is a molecule is a molecule is a machine'; the soft-liners sometimes allow themselves to express a certain hesitancy in the face of questions about such aspects of biology as evolution and goal-seeking behavior, let alone about such topics as values or the mind.
Review, 2919 words
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