Outsider Scientists

An informative look at the history of biology from the perspective of outside influences, appropriate for readers with various academic backgrounds. Recommended.-- "CHOICE" Illustrate[s] a variety of ways of coping with the clash of perspectives that is often encountered in attempts to bridge community and disciplinary barriers. Learning to turn this friction into constructive means of devising and testing assumptions--learning to overcome impasses--should be of considerable value to workaday scientists.-- "BioScience" Offers a very instructive account of the work and ideas of several important figures of the history of the life sciences from the second half of the 19th century to the present. . . . It shows that individual people, at least on some occasions, are able to perform work and develop ideas that are of great significance. Such a demonstration is invaluable to transmit and to help reinforce the taste for research.--Laurent Loison, University of Strasbourg "Centaurus" "Biology is a constantly shifting chimera--so we learn from this remarkable set of essays curated by Oren Harman and Michael R. Dietrich. But unlike the Greek mythic creature (lion, goat, snake), biology, these authors show, has been even more polymorphic, and in ever new ways: biology is put together from linguistic, philosophical, and literary practices, and involves skills borrowed from physics, computation, and chemistry, among other fields. Anyone interested in biology should read this book--and so should all of us who want to understand outside thinking as a crucial driver of innovation." --Peter Galison, Harvard University "Outsider Scientists is a pleasure to read and would be an excellent companion volume for an interdisciplinary class in history or philosophy of biology, science studies, or, indeed, an introductory course in the biological sciences. The contributors are outstanding, and the quality of the historical scholarship, as well as the writing, is consistently high. This volume is a great boon to teachers of science, as well as history and philosophy of science. I highly recommend to all students of biology and its history."-- "Science and Education"

Oren Harman is the chair of the Graduate Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel, and the author of The Man Who Invented the Chromosome and The Price of Altruism. Michael R. Dietrich is professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Dartmouth College and coeditor of The Educated Eye. Together Harman and Dietrich are the editors of Rebels, Mavericks, and Heretics in Biology.