The Egg And The Sperm Race - Couverture souple

Cobb, Matthew

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1416526005 ISBN 13 : 9781416526001

Editeur : Simon & Schuster UK, 2007

Synopsis

Book by Cobb Matthew

A propos du livre

Revue de presse

‘Of all the processes of nature, none is more marvellous than conception and birth. An even greater wonder is that until recently nobody had anything but the foggiest idea of how fertilisation worked...Cobb’s account of “the 17th-century scientists who unravelled the secrets of sex, life and growth” tells how the existence of the human egg and sperm was discovered and how it took another 150 years before fertilisation was figured out’
The Times
‘Not for Antoni van Leeuwenhoek the post-coital cigarette that day in 1677. No sooner had he finished making love to his wife Cornelia than he was up at his home-made microscope, discovering in his semen a “vast number of living animalcules”, little wriggling creatures with rounded bodies and long, vigorous tails. The Dutch draper and microscopist had confirmed, for the first time, the existence of spermatozoa...The book also considers the sometimes bitter rivalry between scientists. Swammerdam and De Graaf, at first close friends, quarrelled over whose research had priority...De Graaf, incidentally, recognised the clitoris as the source of female sexual excitement, arguing that without its “exquisite sensitivity to pleasure and passion” no woman would be prepared to suffer the pains of pregnancy and childbirth’
Financial Times 15/4

‘Men such as Swammerdam, Anton van Leeuwenhoek, Nicolaus Steno and Regnier de Graaf are the unsung heroes of one of the most important stories of scientific discovery in human biology: how reproduction works...This is a fascinating subject, full of arresting material and personalities’
The Sunday Times 16/4

Simon & Schuster author Matthew Cobb is worried about the launch of his new book, THE EGG AND SPERM RACE, after police officers in Brighton banished merchandise bearing the word “sperm” to the back of a shop. Cobb warned booksellers not to put his book in their window displays – and especially not in Brighton, a town clearly awash with unusually sensitive and underemployed policemen. “Anyone who wishes to read my book in a public place would be well advised to cover it in some very thick brown paper” he added.
Diary story in The Bookseller 14/4
‘Anyone wanting to know how the early scientists discovered the secrets of reproduction could not find a better introduction than The Egg and Sperm Race’
Sunday Telegraph
‘The great merit of the book is that the author understands that for a historian to write the history of science properly it is necessary for him to imagine himself in the position of ignorance in which the scientists of the day found themselves, with the limited means at their disposal to dispel their ignorance’
Mail on Sunday,
‘Erudite and insightful...Cobb seamlessly merges biographical detail with social history, providing a fine picture of the worldview of the early investigators of animal development. He never lets us forget that when it comes to the advancement of ideas, perception is key’
New Scientist
‘The book also does a wonderfully engaging job of presenting research on sperm, eggs and fertilization that drew on methods of dissection, observation and experimentation. Cobb's lively stories make the process of scientific discovery and adjudication approachable and intriguing’
Nature Magazine
‘Leonardo da Vinci was not just interested in helicopters, he also speculated on the beginnings of life. In Windsor Castle there is an anatomical drawing of sexual penetration in which the great man had a guess at what it was all about. He conjured up a vessel linking the woman’s nipples and her uterus, while the man’s semen came from his brain via the spinal cord. For his time, these were small mistakes; even decades later, people were indulging in far wider speculations...Between his mental bridge-building exercises Cobb sets vivid descriptions of the intellectual hothouses of Europe...He peoples this history with all manner of wonderful, dedicated enthusiasts for the new disciplines.’
Guardian 1/7
‘Our understanding of the reproductive process is relatively recent. It was commonly supposed that women could as easily give birth to bunnies as babies... A highly entertaining and informative work’
Glasgow Herald 7/4

Quatrième de couverture

'Entertaining and well-written' Anthony Daniels, Mail on Sunday
For thousands of years people believed all sorts of strange things about reproduction - snakes and mice were thought to appear from dirt and it was widely assumed that women could give birth to cats or rabbits. In this world there appeared to be no rules underlying the generation of life.
But all this confusion was blown away by a flurry of discovery in the mid-seventeenth century, made by a small group of European scientists who used experiments and the newly discovered microscope to study the mystery of life. In just one decade they showed that like bred like, that all animals - including humans - come from an egg, that there is no such thing as spontaneous generation, and that there are millions of tiny wriggling 'eels' in semen. At last, the building blocks for understanding how reproduction occurs were in place. But in one of the great ironies of science, it would be another 150 years before the full meaning of their findings became clear.
'Extraordinary ideas . . . A fascinating story' Simon Mayo, Radio Five Live
'Erudite and insightful . . . Cobb's narrative is littered with wonderful examples of human creativity and splendidly eccentric approaches to proof . . . Cobb seamlessly merges biographical detail with social history' New Scientist
'Cobb's approach and enthusiasm are infectious. More history of science should be this enticing and accessible' New York Times
'Excellent . . . [Cobb's] evocations of personality and place are vivid and humane; and he has a novelist's eye for the telling details of a scene . . . There is no more accessible text on the subject' Lancet
£7.99
1-4165-2600-5
HISTORY

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Simon & Schuster UK
• Date d'édition: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1416526005
• ISBN 13: 9781416526001
• Reliure: Poche
• Langue: anglais
• Nombre de pages: 352