Horace Freeland Judson’s The Eighth Day of Creation, a 600-page history of molecular biology. “I was enthralled,” he recalls. He read how James Watson and Francis Crick had discovered the double-helix structure of DNA in 1952. He read how the genetic code had been broken in the 1950s and 1960s. He read how scientists had slowly deciphered the intricately convoluted structures of proteins and enzymes. And as a lifetime laboratory klutz—“I’ve done miserably in every laboratory I’ve been in”—he read about the painstaking experiments that brought this science to life: the questions that made this
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