The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology (1979) 12/2/04. Reviewed by Jon Turney Horace Judson's chronicle of the creators of molecular biology.

Back in the 1960s, Horace Judson was enjoying life as an American journalist in Europe, covering arts and sciences for Time magazine. Then an article on the new science of molecular biology turned into a whole new career. Over the next ten years, he interviewed, read, pondered, and reinterviewed just about everyone who ever had an idea or did an experiment which contributed to the new understanding of how the lives of a cell depend on the fine details of the molecules from which it is built.

Then he forged this mass of material into a monumental but riveting narrative, much of it told in the words of those same scientists. His book is not an oral history but has much of the quality of that genre. It was and remains a remarkable achievement. The greatest scientific endeavour of the twentieth century outside the physical sciences comes alive in his pages, and so do the people who made it. The book is stylishly written, in the manner of the New Yorker essays where the early chapters first appeared. And although DNA plays a key role, Judson saw clearly that structure was as important to the new science as information. He was as enthralled by Max Perutz's decades' long struggle to solve the three-dimensional structure of haemoglobin, for example, as by the effort to decipher the genetic code. Both those stories are told here as slowly developing complements to the dazzling simplicty of the DNA double helix.

It is undeniably satisfying because it is a chronicle of problems which, however puzzling they were only years before, are now largely solved.

Perutz was one of the key figures Judson became especially close to, but he also drew lengthy testimony from other remarkable personalities, especially Francis Crick, Sydney Brenner, Francois Jacob, Matthew Meselson and Jacques Monod. Their versions of what happened were filled out by interviews with more than a hundred others, yet he somehow managed to make use of all this detailed recollection without losing sight of the main lines of development in the field.

The result is a richly peopled account of the new science, before there was any real hint of its application. It is balanced, taking in the contributions of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Paris as well as Cambridge, England, and judicious about the many personalities at work. And it is undeniably satisfying because it is a chronicle of problems which, however puzzling they were only years before, are now largely solved.

A serious work of history, then, although Judson's view of science as, above all, a never-ending search for understanding is a touch romanticised. Later, more academic historians have added further detail and more challenging interpretations of many of the developments he describes, but you can bet they all read and enjoyed this intellectual adventure story first. It is, as Judson says, "not a history of scientific ideas in the abstract but of scientists in the process of discovery". For that, it remains unsurpassed.

Book details

Paperback 714 pages (1979, second edition 1996)
Publisher: First edition, Simon and Schuster (1979); second edition, Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory Press (1996)
ISBN: 0 879694 78 5