LIVES OF A BIOLOGIST

A charming memoir combining autobiography and a 20th-century history of biology.

“A gentleman and a scholar” aptly describes Bonner (Biology Emeritus/Princeton; Life Cycles, 1993, etc.). Born in 1920, he describes growing up in fine style in New York, Paris, and London. His parents moved in literary circles that included the likes of Alexander Woollcott and Rebecca West; late in life, Pa became a bestselling novelist. Early on, Bonner was smitten by nature: first birds and then, after reading H.G. Wells’s The Science of Life, by all living things. He also credits the teachers who inspired him at Harvard and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Intrigued by how a fertilized cell develops into a complex organism, Bonner got turned on to the study of cellular slime molds as a model organism after reading a Ph.D. thesis he picked up by chance. The mold’s lifecycle begins with individual amoebae that (1) eat bacteria until there are no more, then (2) stream together to form a multi-cellular slug-like organism that (3) migrates (secreting all that slime), (4) stops and turns upright, developing a stalk that (5) becomes topped by a fruiting body, which will disperse spores to start the cycle all over again. Myriad questions of how and why would occupy Bonner, aided and abetted by the increasingly sophisticated tools of genetics and molecular biology, for the rest of his career. As he tracks it, he charts the transformation of biology in 20-year spurts, from the rediscovery of Mendel at the turn of the 20th century through population genetics, Watson-Crick, sociobiology, and the genome fallout today. He considers the overarching theme of biology to be lifecycles, embellished by ideas about size, division of labor, and complexity as driving forces of evolution.

Bonner’s own lifecycle makes for pleasant reading and inspires a new respect for slime molds.