I Wish I'd Made You Angry Earlier: Essays on Science, Scientists and Humanity

by Max F. Perutz

Science does not offer a quiet life. Imagination, creativity, ambition, and conflict are as vital and abundant in science as in artistic endeavours. In this delightful collection of essays, Nobel Laureate Max Perutz writes about the pursuit of scientific knowledge, which he sees as an enterprise providing not just a few facts but cause for reflection and revelation. This book contains detective stories, tales of conflict and battle, a woman's love affair with crystals, a man's gruesome fascination with poison gas, perils both phantom and real, and entertaining glimpses of Perutz's own long and exceptional life. Perutz views science as a passionate enterprise and the pursuit of knowledge as a sortie into the these essays explore a remarkable range of topics, both scientific and personal, with the lucidity and precision that he brought to his own pioneering work in protein crystallography.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Biology, Essays, Chemistry

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Art · Rating 4 out of 5]

Covering a tremendous range of topics, from Nobel Prize winners to top-secret aircraft carriers made of ice to crystallography and the exhilarating beginnings of molecular biology, the book is not about Perutz, but about the world he knew, of war and science and brilliant people who make both amazing discoveries and terrible, deadly errors.

If you ever wondered what makes scientists tick and why our knowledge is the way it is, this book will illustrate it brilliantly from the point of view of one of the foremost minds of the 20th century. (Full disclosure: as a passionate structural biologist, I consider Max Perutz, one of the grand-daddies of the science, my personal hero. So I'm a bit biased.)

[Caryatid · Rating 4 out of 5]

I see there are two editions of this book, I read this shorter one, sadly, makes me wonder what I missed. However, I found this one very absorbing, he writes well in his anecdotal pieces - and the scientific, well, lost me but that's ok. I don't expect to understand Fourier transform and the like.
Useful though were the cues I picked up for ordering other books, particularly Peter Medawar re radish book, and wifes book, plus Laura Fermi's book though some others like Hodgkin while I'd like to get, I can't afford.
Nice thing about this is it's written by a very competant researcher himself rather than some journalist that specializes in science.

[Jim]

Good book so far.