Forty years ago, Horace Judson’s The Eighth Day of Creation was published, a book vividly recounting the foundations of modern biology, the molecular biology revolution. This book inspired many in my generation. The anniversary provides a chance for a new generation to take a look back, to see how science has and hasn’t changed. Many central players in the book, including Sydney Brenner, Seymour Benzer, and François Jacob, would go on to be among the founders of modern cell biology, developmental biology, and neurobiology. These players come alive via their own words, as complex individuals, both heroes and anti-heroes. The technologies and experimental approaches they pioneered, ranging from cell fractionation to immunoprecipitation to structural biology, and the multidisciplinary approaches they took continue to power and inspire our work today. In the process, Judson brings out of the shadows the central roles played by women in many of the era’s discoveries. He provides us with a vision of how science and scientists have changed, of how many things about our endeavor never change, and of how some new ideas are perhaps not as new as we would like to think.
Published Online:14 Jan 2020https://doi.org/10.1091/mbc.E19-11-0619
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Downloads: 600History Submitted: 12 November 2019Revised: 18 November 2019Accepted: 19 November 2019
Information © 2020 Peifer. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). Two months after publication it is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0).
I am grateful to Richard Sever for conversations during the drafting of this work, John Inglis and Olivia Judson for help in finding the images used, and the editor for helpful comments. Work in the Peifer lab is supported by National Institutes of Health R35 GM118096.
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