The Logic Of Life: A History Of Heredity

"A great story. . . . A compact encyclopedia of biology, it manages to convey, for all the weight of its content, a sense of continual excitement and wonderment."--Lewis Thomas, author of "The Lives of a Cell"

In "The Logic of Life" Francois Jacob looks at the way our understanding of biology has changed since the sixteenth century. He describes four fundamental turning points in the perception of the structure of living things: the discoveries of the functions of organs, cells, chromosomes and genes, and DNA.