Friday December 30, 2005

My wife gave me a most excellent book for Christmas this year: The Discoveries by Alan Lightman. The format is simple: Lightman has chosen 22 seminal scientific papers of the 20th century and reproduced them here, each with a nicely written forward that explains the context and significance of the paper, some biographical information on the authors, and additional background to help the reader navigate through the paper.

You'll find some obvious choices included: Einstein's 1905 paper on special relativity, Heisenberg's 1927 paper describing uncertainty, Watson and Crick's paper on the structure of DNA, Hubble on the expansion of the Universe.

But there are other treats as well. I was thrilled to see Krebs' paper on the Citric Acid Cycle (AKA, the Krebs Cycle) included as it brought back the sense of wonder I felt in high school physiology when we studied how energy is produced at the cellular level by continuously converting ADP to ATP via the transitions of the Krebs Cycle. The Krebs Cycle rivals the workings of DNA in importance and in elegance.

The Krebs section seems relatively typical of Lightman's overall approach so I will describe it in more details. The reprint of the paper (The Role of Citric Acid in Intermediate Matabolism in Animal Tissues) is preceded by about ten pages of introduction by Lightman. In it, he first outlines briefly the evolution of scientific thought around biological energy use and production, touching on the major names involved. He then introduces Krebs and sets him and his work in the context of other contemporary work--concentrating on work by others that Krebs will unify and extend to describe the basic cycle of energy production in the body. He also covers enough of the basic chemistry and lab methodologies to make the paper understandable to the reader. He ends the introduction with a sort of play-by-play that describes the overall structure of the paper as well as the significance of each of section as Krebs builds to his final conclusions.

If you or someone you know would enjoy a guided tour through some of the most important scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century, then take a look at this book.