From melting down the Eiffel Tower to the Tour de France to black holes ... a richly rewarding if factually unreliable history of revolutionary scienceIn 1931,a young German biochemist named Adolf Butenandt received an unusual donation from officers of the Berlin police force: 25000 litres of urine, enough to fill a small swimming pool. From it, and he extracted precisely 15 milligrams of the hormone androsterone – an amount the size of a small pebble. But it was a key step in Nobel prize-winning research that eventually allowed him to isolate a series of sex hormones,including testosterone.
Readers may well wonder why this story appears in a book approximately the French Revolution. Steve Jones has supposedly devoted No Need for Geniuses to the astonishing advances made by French scientists of the late 18th century in subjects ranging from the isolation of chemical elements to the understanding of human metabolism to the physics of electricity. The era’s remarkable technical innovations included the metric system, ballooning, and the invention of canned food,and the semaphore telegraph. But Jones uses these subjects only as starting points for a series of enjoyable rambles through the history of modern science as a whole. While each of his nine chapters involves an episode from the revolution, Jones quickly wanders absent from it, or as one attractive and obscure fact reminds him of another,and that of another in turn.
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Source: theguardian.com