100 Books Like Laboratory Life

In this classic book, Kuhn introduces the idea of a "paradigm" and shows that real progress comes through paradigm shifts.

That hit me like a rock when I first read it. I love how in the second edition, Kuhn talks about the difficulties of deep change: "the problem is that the new paradigm is always worse than the old one." 

The new paradigm may be better in some way, but it is also sketchy, unformed, and it creates lots of new uncertainties. So, for somebody to shift to a new paradigm always requires a leap of faith!

Of course I love an exposé, heavily seasoned with gossip. Wade’s book tells the story of a race between two teams of scientists to discover the structure of an important brain hormone.

The reality of science is laid out in all its guts and glory: each team leader’s vaulting ambition to win the race, the complicated, error-prone nature of scientific research, and the tremendous and tedious effort involved from day to day—one of the team leaders later estimated he had processed 100,000 pig brains, just to extract enough of the vital substance to run through a testing regime.

In a delightful twist, one of the labs involved in the race is the very place that Latour infiltrated a few years later, and like Latour, Wade shows how the crucial decision to claim that the structure of the molecule had been discovered was as political as it was scientific.

In a cancer research lab, a young scientist thinks he might have found a cure for cancer. But his colleague, who just happens to be his ex-girlfriend, is convinced there are flaws in his work.

I loved the way this novel evokes the reality of scientists’ lab work and their struggles to try and determine what is ‘really’ going on. Too often, science is presented in the media as a straightforward yes-no/right-wrong pursuit, whereas in reality, it’s messy and full of dead ends. This novel portrays scientists as human beings who bring their own passions and prejudices into the lab, which struck me as all too relatable.

I live in the world of words. This book plunged me delightfully into the world of images—photographs of distant galaxies and of artworks inspired by those photographs. The subject of the book is the pioneering astronomer Henrietta Leavitt, whose patient, painstaking scrutiny of astronomical photographs at Harvard 100 years ago led her to discover the patterns in the behavior of Cepheid variable stars that opened the doors to the mapping of the universe.

The author of the book is Anna Von Mertens, a visual artist working with charcoal and textiles who juxtaposes the story of Leavitt’s breakthrough, the work of other women like Leavitt at the Harvard College Observatory, the images that provided the foundation for Leavitt’s thinking, and Von Mertens’ own inspired riffs on those images.

The authors explore why and how personal narratives should be used as evidence (in my case, in history), and the methods and pitfalls of their use. The authors stress the importance of recognizing that stories that people tell about their lives are never simply individual. Rather, they are told in historically specific times and settings and call on rules, models, and social experiences that govern how story elements link together in the process of self-narration. Stories show how individuals' motivations, emotions, and imaginations have been shaped by their cumulative life experiences. This book reveals in simple, jargon-free prose the understanding that takes place between narrators of personal narratives and their audience and enriches the results immeasurably.

The proverbial scientist at work conjures the image of a solitary investigator bent over a workbench cluttered with arcane instruments nestled among reams of scribbled notes just waiting to be transformed into creative answers to pressing questions about the natural world. The image's simplicity belies the complexity of the process it purports to represent. Adding descriptions of the what, how, and why of scientific inquiry, observation, and analysis still misses a crucial element that makes the improvement, dissemination, and acceptance of new knowledge possible, namely the active behind-the-scenes collaboration between scientists and the illustrators, photographers, printers, and other artisans who use visual representation to shape and successfully communicate that knowledge. 

Mapping the Spectrum is not just an exhaustive and illuminating history of spectrum analysis.  In it, author Klaus Hentschel brilliantly exposes the essential role of visual culture in bringing this all-important tool of modern science to useful life.  He has… show more.

Less about biology specifically and more about the general value of the scientific method and rationalism; I think that this book should be read by everyone. Never smug or condescending, Sagan and Druyan show how easily one can be misled by mystical thinking and illustrate the many dangers of credulity.

From cargo cults to baloney detectors, this book is a primer for life in the modern world and how to recognize and protect against disinformation and one’s own biases. I have more than once bought copies of this book for people who are overly enthused about crystals.

I love that Ingold uses the concept of design to explore how people make meaning and things meaningful. By bringing me through lenses such as architecture, archaeology, and art, he shows me that design is not a process of doing but of making.

When we design, we do so by constructing meaning and knowledge. The artifacts that come from my design thinking are secondary effects of the thinking and meaning-making. I love being brought into a larger point of view on the everyday activities of my own life.

I was fascinated by Foster’s detective work in literary history–searching for the actual authors of poems, political novels, and proclamations, the authors of which had always been considered “anonymous.” Using a variety of ingenious methods, Foster tracks down the persons behind mysterious documents ranging from the Unabomber’s threats to “The Night Before Christmas.”

I loved Foster’s wry and sometimes caustic sense of humor, especially when he is skewering the “experts” whom he proves to be wrong. This book is, quite simply, great fun for the intellectually curious.

When I recommended this book to a petroleum geologist, he later told me that it was probably the best book he had ever read–and he understood for the first time what historians actually do (and parenthetically, why the closest field to history in methodology is, in fact, geology).

I’ve also seen undergraduate students come alive intellectually by reading these lectures, given at Oxford by Gaddis as a visiting professor. They are full of remarkable insights into everything from human psychology to fractal geometry. Every chapter is an intellectual feast, showing the vast variety of the historian’s sources and methods.