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

by Max F. Perutz

In this collection of essays, Nobel Prize-winning protein chemist 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, as is a painting or poem. This work includes detective stories, tales of conflict and battle, a woman's love affair with crystals, a man's gruesome fascination with poison gas, Nobel Laureates' geriatric illusions about cancer cures, an onslaught on social relativists, the anticlimactic homecoming of a war hero that led to a Nobel prize, phantom perils that threaten us, and real perils that have been conquered by silent heroes. Perutz seeks to convince us that science is a passionate enterprise and the pursuit of knowledge a sortie into the unknown. He combines potraits of 20th-century giants such as Pauling, Meitner, Medawar, Krebs and others, with glimpses of his own his flight from Vienna in the '30s, internment in Britain as an enemy alien in World War II, rescue from the sea after a U-boat attack, and more. His observations on abortion issues, nuclear fuel reprocessing and human rights reflect a lifelong concern for social justice and scientific integrity.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Biology, Essays, Chemistry

354 pages, Hardcover

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.