Generation: The Seventeenth-Century Scientists Who Unraveled the Secrets of Sex, Life, and Growth

Overview

Four rival anatomists and their race to answer the age-old question: Where does life come from?

Generation is the story of the exciting, largely forgotten decade during the seventeenth century when a group of young scientists--Jan Swammerdam, the son of a Protestant apothecary, Nils Stensen (also known as Steno), a Danish anatomist who first discovered the human tear duct, Reinier de Graaf, the attractive and brilliant son of a rich and successful Catholic architect, and Antoni Leeuwenhoek, a self-taught draper--dared to challenge thousands of years of orthodox thinking about where life comes from. By meticulous experimentation, dissection, and observation with the newly invented microscope, they showed that like breeds like, that all animals come from an egg, that there is no such thing as spontaneous generation, and that there are millions of tiny, wriggling "eels" in semen. However, their ultimate inability to fully understand the evidence that was in front of them led to a fatal mistake. As a result, the final leap in describing the process of reproduction--which would ultimately give birth to the science of genetics--took nearly two centuries for humanity to achieve. Including previously untranslated documents, Generation interweaves the personal stories of these scientists against a backdrop of the Dutch "Golden Age." It is a riveting account of the audacious men who swept away old certainties and provided the foundation for much of our current understanding of the living world.

Editorial Reviews

Today we all know the facts of life, but until the 17th century, even the most basic facts were a complete mystery. At that time, popular belief was that insects arose randomly from rotting meat and a leaf of basil pressed between two bricks would turn into a scorpion. But in one decade, three friends and scientists uncovered the foundations of our modern understanding of procreation: Jan Swammerdam, who was fascinated by insect generation; Niels Steno, "the first person to suggest that all female animals have ovaries"; and Reinier de Graaf, who proved that human females produce eggs. These three men, working in Holland in the 1660s and '70s, were united by the discovery of another Dutchman: Antoni Leeuwenhoek's powerful microscope. Cobb's thorough research results in a portrayal not only of the amazing discoveries in the science of reproduction but life in Holland at the height of its economic and intellectual powers. Cobb works a little too hard to give a sense of inevitability to the lives of his subjects, leading inexorably to their discoveries. If his functional prose lacks vividness at times, Cobb makes up for it with a wealth of historical details. B&w illus. (Aug.)
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Author Information

Bio of Matthew Cobb

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Additional Info

Imprint

Bloomsbury USA

Filesize

5.46 MB

Number of Pages

256

eBook ISBN

9781608190010