Duflo, MIT's Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics, specializes in finding unorthodox ways to help the world's poor. So she concocted an experiment with MIT-based collaborators Abhijit Banerjee and Rachel Glennerster, along with officials from Seva Mandir, a local nongovernmental organization. In some villages, they offered parents about two pounds of free lentils when they brought their children in for shots. Before long, families started streaming into these clinics. About four in 10 children got immunized where free lentils were available.

According to mainstream economic thinking, the success of the lentil giveaway made no sense. The shots were already free. The lentils, a cheap staple of the Indian diet, added little value. "The standard theory of human capital accumulation cannot explain why you go from a few percent to 38 percent," says Duflo. "The fact that there is huge responsiveness to such a small thing is contrary to theory."

But that is precisely why she likes to perform experiments. Duflo, 37, a native of France, has gained renown for using the world as a laboratory to see why aid programs succeed or fail. In so doing, she has not just tweaked conventional wisdom but helped revitalize global antipoverty efforts. For these efforts, she was given a 2009 MacArthur Foundation "genius" award in September.

Duflo's field needed rejuvenation. For decades, governments and aid groups have sunk hundreds of billions of dollars into programs intended to improve global welfare, while economists have toiled to identify a formula that would put poor nations on a path to economic self-sufficiency. But the impact of many aid programs remains hard to measure and subject to intense debate, even as the need grows: from 1970 through 2000, the billion people in the world's poorest countries got slightly poorer, while the rest of the global population realized annual gains in wealth between 2 and 5 percent in each decade.

Duflo, Banerjee, and their collaborators do not focus on sweeping theories. Instead, they run rigorous field experiments to find single factors that make aid programs work--factors like the lentils in Udaipur. In Kenya, Duflo and colleagues got farmers to use more fertilizer by providing free delivery right after harvest. In India, she figured out how to improve instructor attendance in rural one-teacher schools; when teachers' salaries were tied to their attendance, monitored by having them take time- and date-stamped photos of themselves, the absence rate fell by half, improving student performance significantly.

Not all these experiments work so decisively. But when they do, Duflo aims to expand their scope. In 2003, she, Banerjee, and Sendhil Mullainathan (now at Harvard) cofounded MIT's Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), of which Duflo is a director, to fund and popularize successful fieldwork. After J-PAL-affiliated researchers Michael Kremer, an economist at Harvard, and Edward Miguel of the University of California at Berkeley demonstrated that ridding children of intestinal worms is a spectacularly cost-effective way of improving school attendance, the lab worked to publicize the results and promote school-based deworming programs; Duflo, Kremer, and others at J-PAL helped start Deworm the World, a nonprofit organization that provided technical assistance to help the Kenyan government treat 3.6 million children in 2009.

Duflo's achievements have brought her broad acclaim, even apart from the ­MacArthur award. When David ­Leonhardt of the New York Times surveyed economists in 2008 to see who was most effectively "using economics to make the world a better place," Duflo, Banerjee, and J-PAL were the "runaway winner." In January 2009, Duflo became the youngest woman ever to give lectures at the exalted Collège de France, in Paris, drawing international media attention. One London newspaper, theIndependent, called her "the new face of French intellectualism."

In public, Duflo has a preferred sound bite--"There are no magic bullets"--but largely shuns rhetorical flourishes. Audiences may hear more stirring appeals about why we should fight poverty from Bono. But few people have been as innovative about how to fight poverty as Duflo. Her insights are getting a wider hearing: in October, she addressed the United Nations General Assembly, offering a typically pragmatic list of "best buys" among field-tested aid programs for poor countries. (For example, she said, making mosquito netting free, not just cheap, dramatically increases its use as a malaria prevention measure.)

"Esther is motivated by real-world issues," says Harvard's Kremer. "Her work forces us to confront reality." When asked why she studies poverty, Duflo says simply, "I wanted to do something that was relevant."

In her spartan office overlooking the Charles River, Duflo is affable and a bit droll when talking about her work. But she is largely serious-minded. From the age of seven, she says, she wanted to be a historian, and she studied both history and economics as an undergrad at the École Normale Supérieure, in Paris. But when she began graduate work in history, she felt uncomfortable. "Not enough data points," says Duflo, whose father is a mathematician. In 1995, she landed in MIT's PhD program in economics. "I realized that being an economist was a nice way to be in academia and in the world," she says.

Duflo has never left MIT, and her style of economics owes much to its research culture. One of her PhD advisors, professor and labor economist Joshua Angrist, has long argued that economic studies should mimic randomized lab trials. Banerjee, another professor who was an advisor, had already begun using experiments in development economics, and Duflo gravitated to the field. It wasn't long before it became clear that she could make a mark. "It's what we expected from Esther," says Angrist. "She was a great student, and was self-propelled in a way that was unusual. What was unforeseen was the way J-PAL developed. Esther has turned out to be very entrepreneurial as well as a great scholar."

Duflo, Banerjee, and Mullainathan hoped to encourage field experiments in development economics by founding J-PAL, which is funded by Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel '78, a Saudi Arabian businessman who named the center for his father. Though the lab is based at MIT, its members are economists worldwide. They receive some funding, and the lab's prestige helps their discoveries gain notice. J-PAL has now completed 180 studies.

The lab has established enough credibility, Duflo says wryly, that conducting unusual experiments to fight poverty "is not just what crazy people do. It's what J-PAL does." She pauses. "Well, we are still the same crazy people. But the existence of J-PAL means it goes from being my thing or Abhijit's thing to our thing, a community of people who are all working in this field this way."

That way of working is highly collaborative. For all her individual honors, Duflo has coauthored papers with nearly 30 colleagues, and she's written more than 20 pieces with Banerjee. "We work in very different ways," says Banerjee. "Esther is extraordinarily fast in implementing the conceptual framework we come up with. I work more slowly, polishing that [material] into something we both like."

The experimental method also requires extensive research. "Esther spends a lot of time speaking with people in the villages, not sitting in the capital city talking to donors," says Kremer, who has worked with Duflo and others for years to refine the Kenyan fertilizer experiments. And experiments are vital, Duflo emphasizes, because not all ideas pan out: "If a theory is wrong, you are going to find it."

In turn, some discoveries improve the world, which is what matters most to Duflo. Consider the Udaipur lentil giveaway, which J-PAL now aims to test on a larger scale in India. "This is my favorite project," she allows. "I think it could become the best we've ever done, in terms of saving lives."

For about 150 years, we have known how species evolve. The emergence of life itself remains more obscure. But as Lane shows with clarity and vigor in “Life Ascending,” fascinating studies on the subject abound. A trained biochemist, Lane smoothly pulls in evidence from genetics, proteomics (the study of proteins), paleontology and geophysics to show how the critical components and mechanisms of complex life — from DNA and photosynthesis to sex and vision — could have developed. Because “a chemical reaction happens spontaneously if all the molecular partners desire to participate,” he dismisses the “thermodynamically flat” primordial soup as a starting point for life and instead looks for ways hydrogen and oxygen can get together. Someday we may need a sequential illustration showing man standing upright after emerging from porous rocks in hydro­thermal vents — where suggestive research locates the first signs of complex molecules and DNA. This is not a comprehensive textbook, and the concluding chapters on consciousness and death lack the biochemical signature of the best sections. Still, Lane shows how thoroughly, if provisionally, we can reconstruct evolutionary developments. Reading the remote past, he argues, “is a science in its own right, one that can only enrich our understanding of life.”

NAMING NATURE
The Clash Between Instinct and Science.
By Carol Kaesuk Yoon.
Norton, $27.95.

Evolutionary theory has caused rifts within science, not just outside it. Yoon’s clever “Naming Nature” explores the historical tension between evolutionary biology and taxonomy. In evolution, species are mutable. But the 18th-century founder of taxonomy, Linnaeus, assuredly did not think so, and 20th-century taxonomists, in Yoon’s telling, struggled to define species in light of evolution while still relying on intuitive, visual judgments. Taxonomy has become truly modernized only in recent decades, Yoon argues, as it has moved from the field to the lab, adopted statistical and genetic methods of comparison, and organized itself around evolutionary changes. The dialectical sting in this tale, though, is Yoon’s stout support for old-fashioned forms of taxonomy. Lab-based taxonomy, she argues, yields counterintuitive results, whereas visual classifications logically express our predisposition to order the world in informal, sensible ways. Yoon marshals evidence for the near universality of the classifying instinct, which yields a “vision of the natural order” that “often stands in direct conflict with a scientific and evolutionary ordering of life.” But she plays down the idea that abstract classification can enlighten us. Recognizing birds as dinosaurs, or linking lungfish to cows — recent insights that Yoon sees as affronts to common sense — can attune us to the relationship of organism and environment in a changing world. Practical local knowledge and codified science are not inescapably incompatible, as she only briefly acknowledges. Ultimately, Yoon asserts that in conceding scientific authority to taxonomists, we have surrendered our observational skills and critical thinking, and contributed to our own alienation from the natural world. She hopes projects like Edward O. Wilson’s Encyclopedia of Life will reconnect science with engaged observation. Whether or not you share her views, this is a lively blend of popular scientific history and cultural criticism, itself defying simple classification.

DARWIN’S ARMADA
Four Voyages and the Battle for the Theory of Evolution.
By Iain McCalman.
Norton, $29.95.

Charles Darwin was hardly the only significant evolutionary thinker of his era to make a formative sea voyage. This was a rite of passage for aspiring naturalists, as McCalman recounts in “Darwin’s Armada,” which traces the journeys of Darwin alongside those of Joseph Hooker, Thomas Henry Huxley and Alfred Russel Wallace, each of whom spent years exploring the Southern Hemisphere. To know evolution’s early champions, this book implies, we should know their early adventures. McCalman notes significant observations that prefigured each man’s mature evolutionary thought. But his narratives are as much bildungsroman as scientific analysis, showing how the four voyagers were steeled and transformed by the demands of the sea and the wondrous unfamiliarity of life on distant shores. There are some vivid vignettes: Hooker nearly shipwrecked in the Antarctic, and a love-struck Huxley depressively remaining shipboard instead of exploring the Great Barrier Reef. Absorbing these trips in parallel reminds us that Darwin was only the most successful voyaging naturalist who discarded old verities about the fixed form of species. But the structure of “Darwin’s Armada” inevitably limits our ability to trace these four rather different intellectual trajectories over time. Still, McCalman has produced an accessible introduction to the lesser-known ocean voyages of Hooker and Huxley, while Wallace’s incredible wanderings retain their ability to amaze.

THE LINK
Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor.
By Colin Tudge with Josh Young.
Little, Brown, $25.99.

While the 150th anniversary of “On the Origin of Species” is being feted this year, Darwin’s older relative Ida has become a media star as well. Ida, to be clear, is the 47-million-year-old lemur-like fossil unveiled this past spring, who may be our oldest known primate ancestor. Then again, she may not be. The team that brought Ida to light, led by the Norwegian paleontologist Jörn Hurum, has been touting Ida as a “missing link” between human predecessors and other early primates. In “The Link,” part of Ida’s floodlit public debut (along with a documentary and a media tour), Hurum’s colleague Jens Franzen says Ida’s impact will be “like an asteroid hitting the earth.” But other scientists are wary of these claims, arguing that Ida may be a distant cousin, not a direct human ancestor. This book is a compromise between promoting the fossil and conceding the uncertainties around it. Tudge gamely outlines the relevant environmental, geological and paleontological history, and notes the provisional nature of many hypotheses involving fossils; and in separate chapters, Young describes Ida’s discovery and reception. What’s largely missing from “The Link,” however, is Ida. There are only brief sections analyzing the fossil’s characteristics and evolutionary implications. For now, Ida is less a link than an outlier, the most complete primate fossil of her time. Vivid as Ida appears, the meaning we extract from any one fossil necessarily depends on the presence of others. There are no solo shows in evolution, just ensemble performances.

"Climate Change: Picturing the Science," a new book by Gavin Schmidt and Joshua Wolfe, aims to alter that by providing a rich photographic record of a warming world. Some photos tell a self-evident record of geophysical change, like a shot of Lake Powell, on the Arizona-Utah border, where warming-induced drought has produced a dramatically lowered water line -- a yellow "bathtub ring" of once-submerged rock.

In other cases, knowing a little about our climate can affect the way we interpret these photos -- lending a more menacing air to seemingly benign images. An aerial shot of a massive Dutch sea barrier, with the city of Rotterdam lying just beyond, looks like an ode to Sisyphean futility. A gorgeous photo of sunlight striking a glacier in Peru's Quelccaya ice cap symbolically sums up a larger question: How long will such formations resist the effects of the sun?

To provide some of that knowledge, Schmidt, a climatologist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, wrote a few accompanying essays and solicited several others from colleagues. The book emphasizes the complexity of the climate change problem, noting the wide range of greenhouse gases that engender warming (not just carbon dioxide but also methane, aerosols and more), the many ways we release them, and the varied regional effects they produce. Climate change is not a one-dimensional problem with a simple solution, so we need to grasp the totality of the global climate system.

Salon spoke to Schmidt about our inability to grasp global warming, the nature of climate science, and our prospects for a cooler future.

Why is it important to depict climate change visually?

The imagery associated with climate change often veers toward the overly dramatic. That isn't to say climate change is not dramatic. But people get the idea that climate change is all about polar bears and hurricanes. What we tried to do was to find images that showed the relationship between climate change and people and that brought out some of the long-term nature of changes and its complexity. Small things that happen because of climate change end up having big effects.

What's a small change in nature that leads to a larger problem?

Pine-bark beetles. They are a pest for lodge-pole pine trees in Colorado up through British Columbia to Alaska. They are very sensitive to cold. If it doesn't fall below minus 20 Celsius [minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit] for a week or two during the winter, they reproduce rapidly. As the winters have gotten warmer, the range of the beetles has expanded enormously, much faster than their predators. If you visit Colorado, behind the Front Range, you'll see whole hillsides devastated by these pine-bark beetles. In British Columbia and Alaska, it's huge thousand-mile tracts of forest. These changes have been leading to forest fires, because now you've got more fuel, which increases carbon emissions.

Beyond fixating on polar bears, what else are we missing about climate change?

There's still a lot of confusion about the role of humans. If you look at opinion polls, people are much less aware of our role in pushing climate change forward than the scientific community or even policymakers. And we're trying to make clear it's a multifaceted problem. It's not just carbon dioxide but methane emissions, black carbon and aerosols. It's not just you driving your SUV that's causing it.

People also see the conclusions of science, but they don't see the process of science. When somebody tells them what scientists say, there's a knee-jerk reaction: "Who the hell are scientists to be telling us these things?" So we try very hard to give a sense of how scientists really go about their detective work. How do you piece together a hugely complex situation like the earth's climate?

I think a big problem is that we often view science as a source of fixed facts. For a lot of us, high school biology just involved memorizing the parts of a cell. Whereas climate science is more about analyzing cause and effect in a complex system, adding information in, understanding results we measure as probabilities.

This is reinforced all the time in popular culture. And the way we teach science is that Newton said "X" and it's correct, so learn this formula. This promotes the idea that science knows all the answers. Whereas when you look at any actual working scientist, whether it's in climate change or medicine or building a nuclear power plant, the stock in trade of science is uncertainty; it's not certainty.

Niels Bohr said, "Prediction is difficult, particularly when it's about the future." People demand certainty from scientists they would never demand from any other field of life. In economic policy, with the stimulus package, are we saying, "This will fix everything"? No, there are all these variables like consumer confidence, and people understand it's a complex problem. Yet when it comes to something slightly more scientific, you often hear that unless the science is 100 percent certain, it's not worth listening to.

People clearly recognize the limits of scientific knowledge in medicine. One reason we use a medical analogy in the book -- symptoms, diagnosis, cures -- was to tap into this. We have symptoms, the doctor prods and pokes and says, "Let's have a follow-up test," and then comes back with, "Well, maybe you need to cut down on your cholesterol. Maybe you can take this drug. It might have side effects." People don't expect a doctor to predict exactly the day that they're going to die, or even exactly what they have. Doctors have an enormous body of knowledge that allows them to treat people with beneficial effects, but there's no guarantee. People understand that.

I'm not sure people don't expect more from doctors. But doesn't the analogy work if we simply talk about medical research? In the United States 15 or 20 years ago, people thought power lines caused cancer, or today it might be cellphones. And to find out, we have to study a complex interaction of the body with the environment. But then maybe we end up inferring the answer -- and anyway, it's a matter of probability, from one person to another.

The way you would test if cellphones really cause cancer is that you'd have one section of the population use cellphones all the time, and then you'd have a control group not allowed to use cellphones, and you'd measure the rate of cancer in each group. Partly due to ethical considerations, that's never going to happen. So our conclusions are pieced together from epidemiological evidence, from models for how the brain reacts to electromagnetic radiation, animal analogs, all sorts of complex ways to tackle that problem, because you can't really do the experiment that would prove it.

The situation with the climate is exactly the same. We can't do controlled experiments where we change the carbon dioxide level, and we don't change anything else, to see what effect it has. We can't change the amount of forestation or levels of methane or aerosols, and not change anything else. But just as epidemiologists and diagnosticians get at a medical question from multiple angles and find a balance of evidence, we do the same for the planet. I think we've convincingly shown the planet is affected by our activities, whereas the link between various things and cancer is much more ambiguous. But it's the same technique.

You're a scientist, not a policymaker, but in the book you mention the "tragedy of the commons," the way individuals benefit by using collective resources, to everyone's long-term detriment. Can we solve climate change, or are we resigned to being unable to take action?

I oscillate between being optimistic and pessimistic. This administration has made very positive statements. But then you look at what people are proposing to do, and how many coalitions we have to get on board to get something changed, it's easy to throw up your hands and say, "We're all going to go the way of the Easter Islanders." Some days I wake up and think that we will, and other days I wake up and think that we won't.

Which one of those days is it when you hear comments from a scientist like physicist Freeman Dyson, who dismisses climate change as a non-problem?

It surprises me. The guy's obviously smart, and he's made a career of thinking against the grain and has come up with good solutions to problems in physics. But he's had a strong preference for problems that could be solved just by thinking about them. If you look at the kind of things he didn't go into as a physicist, they required the understanding of complex systems, where there are a bunch of different things going on and it's not amenable to sitting there with a pencil and paper coming up with a new formula.

You see this a lot. Scientists have preferences for certain kinds of problems. Some people want something straightforward, and others are attracted to the complexity of the real world or the human body and enjoy wrestling out information from something that's more complex than we can grasp. And he seems to be very much the former.

Dyson told the New York Times, "The climate studies people who work with models always tend to overestimate their models. They tend to believe models are real and forget they are only models." Well, you're a climate modeler, so how do you respond to that?

That's the kind of thing somebody says when they've never met a climate modeler. We're the people who know how the sausage is made. I'm a climate modeler in one of the 20 or so groups whose work goes into the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report. We spend our all our time working out how we can make these things better. We can see the uncertainties and compromises one has to make in order to build a model. We're traveling the world to find interesting pieces of data, we're traveling back in time, as it were, back to the last ice age, to find samples to help us see if the models are any good. The idea that climate modelers go around saying, "Our ideas are perfect," is just nonsense.

What's a piece of knowledge we've gained from climate modeling?

Did you see "The English Patient"? The last scene is in a cave in the Sahara, which obviously used to be an oasis. And it's true that about 5,000 years ago, the Sahara was much greener and wetter than it is now. Our best guess about why is that the orbit of the earth has changed since then. It used to be warmer in the summertime in the Northern Hemisphere because we were slightly closer to the sun, and now we're closer to the sun in the wintertime. We can put that in the models. And when we do, the models produce more rain over the Sahara. So our understanding of why the Sahara was greener in the past is pretty good.

But there are still uncertainties among the models about the amount of rain or how far north the rain band goes. And we're trying to see if there are improvements -- if how you deal with clouds, convection, vegetation and land-atmosphere interactions affects the basic underlying results. So far it doesn't. So that's a pretty robust result. It's not that we think the models are perfect. It's that we have a balance of evidence, and it bolsters the case that we have the right idea of what's going on.

You quote Thoreau in the book: "The wind that blows is all that anybody knows." What does that mean to you?

People often interpret climate change in terms of local weather. If there's a big storm, inevitably somebody will call me up and say, "Is this climate change?" And people will say that the difference in temperature between one summer and the next, in their locality, is larger than what we're saying about global warming. And that's true. Global warming comes out when you average these things together, and you look not at the local or regional scales, but the continental and global and hemispheric scales. Then you see the difference.

Weather can give people a look into climate change. New York used to have a lot more snow than it does now. Over a lifetime you can start to see those changes. But people's memories are poor and the climate change story is best seen in the statistics and in long-terms trends.

It's a big problem. People can see if the Hudson River or the Gowanus Canal is polluted. Those kinds of environmental problems have local sources and local witnesses. A big conceptual issue that makes climate change difficult to get across is that everything we do is all being mixed into the atmosphere, whether it's driving in the United States, or a power station in China, or sheep in New Zealand.

What about our sense of geologic time? We have only been here a very short time and yet the planet has gone through billions of years of changes.

Yes, a lot of people look at geology and say, "Well, things have changed in the past, and the planet has survived." True. But whether the planet survives isn't only our concern. It's whether our society survives. Climate change in and of itself is not intrinsically evil. The problem comes because of how we live.

There's another picture in the book of a house that's about to collapse in the village of Shishmaref in Alaska. OK, maybe they weren't so smart, building their house on permafrost that's going to melt. But it's not their fault. That entire village has been wiped off the map because the sea ice has gone, leading to erosion on the coast, and it turns out they were building their homes on a pile of sand. And that's a really good metaphor for what we're doing here. It turns out we've constructed society on a pile of sand, and we're only just realizing how fragile it is.

At what point did we have enough evidence to say humans are involved in climate change?

People knew in the early 1960s. President Johnson, I think in 1965, discussed in Congress the fact that increasing amounts of carbon dioxide were likely to warm the planet and the temperature might increase by half a degree by the end of the 20th century. So people knew, and everything subsequent has been a question of trying to quantify all the effects. As time has gone on, we've accounted for the things contributing to climate change other than carbon dioxide.

You mean like the potential release of trapped methane, which we might not have thought about back then.

It's not that we wouldn't have thought about them, but it was difficult to be quantitative. We didn't have satellite measurements until 1979, so we weren't able to see the extent of deforestation. We weren't able to see the extent of changes in use of aerosols and other air pollutants. In the absence of data it's very difficult to make scientific progress. What we've done in the last 30 years is quantify those things. People knew about black carbon a long time ago. But it's only recently we've had the measurements and understanding of the microphysics to quantify the impact. People started thinking about methane as a problem back in 1974. We know a bit more about the chemistry and the sources, but the basic picture hasn't changed.

How much time do we have to solve the problem, and what should we do?

This notion that we have a certain amount of years to act is a terrible framing. Whatever the situation is, whatever date, there will always be things we can do to make the situation less bad in the future. Our choice is not between a globally warm world or the world that we live in. It makes people think they can just do what they want now, then act in 10 years. The most fundamental thing is that somehow, somewhere, there has to be a price on putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

But because of the multifaceted nature of the problem, because a lot of pollutants have direct impacts on health and the environment as well as the climate, there are a lot of win-win situations. We can help the Chinese reduce their pollutants -- which would help them reduce carbon emission and help everyone -- or use methane emissions from landfills to run power stations in small communities in the Philippines. People are dying from burning black carbon on their homes in India. We should fix that, as a moral imperative. And in doing so, we can help fix the climate.

What was Geissler doing with this copy of the treatise that so brilliantly laid out the principles of evolution? Well, in the early 1920s, someone removed the volume from the library. About five years later, Geissler says, a relative of hers, a scholar in Providence, R.I., bought it at a sale. Several years ago, Geissler’s mother, sorting through old family belongings, gave the book to Geissler. “It was in a box in the attic,” she recalled in a recent interview. “If my mother hadn’t noticed, it would have been thrown in the trash.” Geissler and her husband decided to return the book: “Now everyone can see it.”

Through it all, this copy of the “Origin” has remained in good condition. “Whoever had it for most of the 80 years kept it nicely and clearly treasured it,” said Susan Glover, who oversees the rare-books department at the Boston Public Library. And it is a treasure. A first edition of the “Origin” sold last year at Christie’s for $194,500.

But as celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the book’s publication continue, the episode raises a question. How many other first editions of “On the Origin of Species” are still tucked away in bookcases, boxes or attics? Could anyone else stumble across Darwin’s master­piece by accident?

There are reasons to suspect it will happen again. Unlike any other epochal work of science, “On the Origin of Species” was written for a mass audience. Instead of being acquired only by elite intellectuals and libraries, it was bought by popular-science readers within the Victorian bourgeoisie. Among rare books, this makes the “Origin” a further rarity: the people’s scientific blockbuster, if you will.

This manner of distribution increases the odds that “Origin” first editions are resting in obscure places. “It seems highly likely that some copies are lying about unrecognized,” said John van Wyhe, a bye-fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, and director of the Darwin Online project, which places Darwin documents on the Web. That cannot be said of some other famous works. For example, scholars believe they have an essentially complete list of 276 surviving first editions of Copernicus’s “On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres,” with further surprise findings highly unlikely.

By contrast, no one knows how many of the 1,250 first-edition copies of the “Origin” still exist. Thus, in this anniversary year, researchers for Darwin Online are conducting the first census of the first edition, contacting private collectors, studying library catalogs and hoping owners will contact them through the Darwin Online Web site. “Clearly quite a few are in private hands,” said Angus Carroll, director of the census. (For those wondering about their own copy, he suggests a handy way of identifying a first edition: on the 11th line of Page 20, the word “species” is incorrectly rendered as “speceies.”)

Why is Carroll so certain that more first editions are still in private hands? Scholars know that Darwin’s publisher, John Murray, printed 1,250 copies of the “Origin” for its Nov. 24, 1859, publication. Darwin quickly made some revisions, and Murray declared his next printing of 3,000, in January 1860, to be the second edition. At the time, the rapid appearance of a new edition may have diminished the distinctiveness of the first edition, leaving it in the hands of regular readers. Carroll believes that the first formal census figure, to be announced in November, will be between 600 and 700 copies, but said that within a few years, “I fully expect to find 1,000.” Even so, a couple of hundred would remain at large; Carroll estimates that only three to seven emerge for sale each year.

Certainly, some “Origin” first editions are easy to trace. Darwin was given a dozen and bought 80 more for notable colleagues and intellectuals, including the geologist Charles Lyell and the social philosopher Herbert Spencer. “There is a very good chance the ones sent to prominent individuals have survived,” van Wyhe said.

Around 1,100 first-edition copies were sold publicly, according to Janet Browne, a Harvard historian of science and Darwin biographer. Of these, 500 were purchased by Mudie’s Circulating Library, which mailed its subscribers books every month. Mudie’s also ran a secondhand store in London, and Browne believes they “almost certainly” sold first editions there. But others from the circulating collection may have disappeared into home libraries. In any case, even the copies now owned by large institutions show us how first editions of the “Origin” bounced from homes to booksellers and back.

Consider the two copies I examined at the Boston Public Library (which owns three in all). How did the library acquire them in the first place? “We don’t know,” Susan Glover of the rare-books division said. There is no acquisition record for either book. Julie Geissler’s copy has been rebound. The other copy, still in its original green and gold binding, has some older ownership labels inside it. One reads “R. G. Tatham,” with an address around London’s docklands area. Another label cites W. W. Lucy, a bookshop. Still another, in both English and Latin, says “Caroli ac Mariae Lacaitae Filiorumque Selham Sussex.”

Glover suggested I take these clues to pursue my own sleuthing about this copy — so I did. These few labels, it turns out, evoke a lot of history. “R. G. Tatham” was almost certainly one Robert Gordon Tatham, a “much respected” London doctor who lived from 1829 to 1895, according to his obituary in The British Medical Journal. He sounds like just the kind of interested professional — not an academic specialist — Darwin was hoping to reach.

The joint English-Latin inscription indicates the book once belonged to a couple, Charles and Mary Lacaita, and their children. Charles Lacaita, a member of Parliament in the 1880s and a botanist, lived in the town of Selham, in West Sussex. His father, Sir James Lacaita, was one of many prominent Italian exiles who moved to England in the 19th century, and a noted bibliophile. His son, Francis, was killed in World War I. Book dealers have found similar Lacaita family labels, most likely from the early 20th century, in other science volumes.

I would guess this book belonged to Tatham, was sold to W. W. Lucy after his death, then to the Lacaita clan. It is not clear how either copy crossed the Atlantic, although prominent American families of the time often collected art and valuables in Europe, then donated heavily to public institutions. The Boston Public Library, housed in an 1895 Charles McKim building decorated with John Singer Sargent murals, attracted this kind of patronage.

So in these first editions of “On the Origin of Species,” we glimpse an intellectually curious member of the Victorian bourgeoisie, the unusual family story of an Italian exile in England, the agony of the Great War, the rise of American wealth and collecting, a Rhode Island scholar’s quiet bibliophilia, and a New Hampshire woman’s matter-of-fact generosity. Not bad for a couple of books. And while they wound up in a library, many others that remain at large probably offer similarly rich and varied histories.

“There might be more of these amazing, serendipitous moments to come,” van Wyhe said. With all due respect to the high-powered institutions and collectors who are preserving and cataloging the first edition of “On the Origin of Species,” it would reflect the popular spirit of Darwin’s work if it remained a source of such humble surprises.

It turns out the president cannot separate politics and science so easily. No sooner had Obama issued his order than conservative lawmakers in state legislatures began proposing new restrictions on embryonic stem cell research, ranging from criminal penalties to bans on state-level funding. In fact, Obama's decision has emboldened conservatives to increasingly link stem cell research to abortion. Far from conceding the issue, they are in it for the long haul.

But the stem cell battle is not just a high-profile clash of values. The dispute provides a sharp focus on how science may help reshape America. Several states have set aside billions of dollars to support stem cell research, and the new federal money Obama is promising will generally flow to those areas. That means states supporting stem cell research will experience an economic windfall while attracting highly educated technology workers who tend to vote Democratic. The more conservative states restricting stem cell research will attract fewer funds and fewer socially liberal voters. In short, a state's stem cell policy will influence electoral results and help determine whether a state turns red or blue.

At the moment, stem cell science mirrors November's electoral map. Twelve states allow the use of public money to fund stem cell research -- and Obama won them all in 2008. Four states have moved to either restrict stem cell research or limit public expenditures for it since Obama's announcement -- and they all voted for John McCain. But now that map could change.

In stem cell politics, key battlegrounds include Georgia, Texas and Arizona -- red states where Obama and the Democrats made inroads. These are places that have significant academic and scientific infrastructures but that Republicans control politically. Restrictions on science there could slow the kind of economic growth associated with Democratic support. At the same time, the GOP is putting its popularity at risk by curbing research that most voters support. The new regional political dynamic of the stem cell war is set.

Most cells are specialized. Your various forms of white blood cells fight illnesses, while red blood cells help oxygen circulate in the body. Stem cells are unspecialized, waiting to be assigned roles. If we could give stem cells the right biological instructions, we could use them to repair damaged body parts such as heart muscle cells, limiting heart disease.

Adult stem cells help maintain a particular bodily organ or tissue. The brain has its own reserve supply of adult stem cells. But embryonic stem cells have not yet been directed to a particular body part, increasing their potential value. They might help fix any organ or tissue.

Extracting the stem cells from a days-old embryo, usually acquired from an in vitro fertilization clinic, destroys the embryo. Many scientists have argued that since clinics produce more embryos than they use, employing the remaining ones for medicine is ethically justified. But stem cell research opponents disagree and have responded by trying to alter the practices of fertility clinics.

In 2007, researchers announced the development of induced pluripotent stem cells (IPSCs) in humans -- adult cells reprogrammed to mimic embryonic stem cells. In theory, IPSCs could bring the political battle over stem cells to an end, since producing them does not involve embryos. But many scientific hurdles remain to be cleared before IPSCs can be considered a safe and complete replacement for embryonic stem cells.

In 2001, Bush announced a ban on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, except for work on a limited number of already existing stem cell "lines." Since then, 12 states have funded stem cell research themselves. California's program, at $3 billion, is the biggest. The state aims to build a dozen stem cell facilities at universities and other research institutes and says it has awarded more than $600 million in research money so far.

The overall economic impact of the biotech industry is even greater than the numbers suggest, as industry earnings create a "multiplier effect" that ripples through a local economy. In California, such activity includes the construction workers building the new Mission Bay research facility for the University of California at San Francisco, and the service industries that grow around well-paid technology workers. A 2004 Milken Institute report estimated that every biotechnology job in California creates an additional 3.5 jobs. In 2003, industry earnings in California totaled about $5 billion but created about $21 billion in overall economic output.

States not investing in stem cell science are missing out on this bonanza. Not only is this part of biotech economically regenerative, but it's also popular. A 2007 Gallup Poll showed that by a 64-to-30 margin, Americans think embryonic stem cell research is "morally acceptable." But social conservatives such as Oklahoma state Rep. Mike Reynolds, disagree. Reynolds introduced a bill making it a misdemeanor to conduct research on embryonic stem cells. "I am a pro-life candidate, and I believe life begins at conception," Reynolds says.

In Georgia, a bill under consideration would put limits on both stem cell research and in vitro fertility clinic practices. "A person is a person no matter how small," says Dan Becker, president of Georgia Right to Life. "There is a paradigm shift going on, a shift toward personhood. You're going to see more states adopt that strategy." Indeed, bills in Texas and Mississippi would bar state funding for embryonic stem cell research. Arizona is among the states already featuring similar laws.
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But Georgia best exemplifies the political and economic issues at stake. The state "is a prime example of the legislative revolt as a result of Obama's executive order," says Patrick Kelly, director of state government relations at Bio, an umbrella group representing biotechnology firms.

Georgia may be red on electoral maps, but in November, Obama lost to McCain there by a mere 5 points -- the best showing by any Democratic presidential candidate, apart from Southerners Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, since 1960. Democratic challenger Jim Martin forced incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss to a runoff with a 3-point loss, although Chambliss' subsequent 15-point victory shows that a real gap still exists.

In March, the Georgia Senate passed a stem cell bill that limits new embryonic stem cell research and prevents couples who use in vitro fertilization clinics from authorizing the destruction of their own remaining embryos. The state House of Representatives may take up the bill in the fall. The measure shows how conservatives are linking stem cell research to abortion by promoting the "personhood" of embryos.

"We've been good at spinning many antiabortion scenarios," Becker says. "What we've failed to do is personalize the embryo issue. We're shifting and attacking the position that in the first trimester this is nothing other than a medical blob. This is a human being." Georgia Right to Life has created television spots to reinforce the message.

The bill's opponents emphasize their own moral interests. The legislation "would tell patients that we are not interested in helping them," says Charles Craig, president of Georgia Bio, which is lobbying against the bill along with various patients' rights organizations.

As far as the economic consequences, Craig believes that "if Georgia were to restrict science considered legal and ethical by the federal government, it would send a message that Georgia is out of step, and possibly anti-science and anti-technology."

Biotech backers want to develop the state's Innovation Crescent, running from Atlanta to Athens, which features research universities including Georgia Tech, Emory and the University of Georgia. The state's life science industry has grown 140 percent since 1993, although the state lags in some measures. While ninth in population in the U.S., Georgia ranked 22nd in the number of biotech workers in 2003.

Stem cell research can be funded in at least four ways: federal funds, state money, private gifts and venture capital. Banning state funds eliminates only one income stream. But that can lead to substantial economic disparities. In 2006, New York's state agencies, which are vigorously pursuing biotech growth, spent about $100 million more on scientific research and development than did Georgia's, nearly five times as much per capita.

State funds attract additional research dollars, magnifying these discrepancies. One modest piece of legislation in California, the Roman Reed Spinal Cord Injury Research Act, named for a young man who was paralyzed playing football, authorized $12.5 million in state funding -- but garnered $50 million in matching grants.

"There's a huge push-pull effect," says Don Reed, Roman Reed's father, who is now vice president of Americans for Cures, a stem cell research advocacy group. "If I were running a state, I would not wait to set up a funding program. It's going to help their economies."

Kelly agrees. "Places that have put in place stem cell programs also have more scientific infrastructure and an indigenous research community," he says. "And they will continue to lead the charge because they're that much further ahead."

On the other hand, state funding bans can be both a symbolic and a tangible deterrent to scientists -- and hinder a state's economy. In a 2005 Science paper, researchers Joanna Kempner, Clifford Perlis and John Merz found that scientists pursuing controversial research feel cornered not only by formal restrictions -- like funding laws -- but also by social pressures. "Informal limitations are more prevalent and pervasive than formal constraints," they write.

Texas-based journalist Bill Bishop, coauthor of "The Big Sort," a book about the social polarization of America, has discussed the problem of social stigmatization with Houston-area scientists. "They were saying, 'I don't want to live some place where I'm considered immoral,'" Bishop says. "They pick up these signals and they don't want to work in a setting where they will feel shunned." Likewise, Craig suggests, "If Georgia is singled out as a state restricting this research, it could give scientists pause about coming here."

Stem cell opponents, in Georgia or elsewhere, are unconcerned with economic fallout. "I have no interest in supporting the economy of murdering unborn children," says Reynolds, the Oklahoma legislator.

But if state support for stem cell science makes an economic difference, does it matter at the ballot box? Although scientists and technology workers are hardly a unified voting bloc, expanding a regional science community seems to increase the number of educated, socially liberal voters. And that helps Democrats. In the 2008 election, 17 percent of the electorate had attended graduate school, and those voters supported Obama by a 58-40 ratio, compared to his overall 53-46 margin of victory.

Most likely, highly educated voters have already colored the electoral map in North Carolina, poster child for biotechnology growth. In the Raleigh-Durham area's Research Triangle, local leaders have aggressively recruited biotech firms and promoted the region's universities as sources of intellectual capital. In the state, Obama beat McCain by 13,692 votes, but won the 13 self-identified Research Triangle counties by 145,498 votes. That's over 100,000 more than Bill Clinton's Research Triangle margin in 1992. And while more than one factor explains this increase -- high turnout, student vote -- North Carolina's high-tech growth surely helped turn the state blue in 2008.

"If you look at where states are growing, it's the urban areas, and clearly technology plays a leading role," says Ruy Teixeira, coauthor of "The Emerging Democratic Majority." "Biotechnology is one of the things that create growth, with implications politically. The effect is that it will make those areas more progressive." Georgia could follow the same general pattern. "I don't think it's far out of reach," Teixeira says, citing the potential for economic changes in the Atlanta area. "That's going to be the ground where a shift takes place." It certainly has room to grow. Georgia is slightly bigger than North Carolina in population, yet according to the Milken Institute numbers, the biotech business accounts for only about 17,000 jobs in Georgia, compared with 127,000 jobs in North Carolina.

To be sure, there are only so many biology Ph.D.s out there who vote. "The question is, What gets you from tens of thousands of high-tech voters to a larger change in voting patterns?" says Andrew Gelman, director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University and coauthor of the book "Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State." One prominent type of answer comes from economic theorist Richard Florida, who believes information-age cities are magnets for "creative class" workers, perpetuating a blend of high-tech growth and social liberalism. Teixeira calls these places "ideopolises."
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Biotechnology's future jobs will also be filled by the young, who trend heavily Democratic: Obama won the 18-to-29 age group by a 66-32 ratio. Georgia has a young population, although the creative-class thesis holds that such workers follow jobs across the map. In Texas, there is a potent research infrastructure, albeit in a large state, and multiple institutes have started stem cell research in recent years. These include the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, the Heart Hospital of Austin, and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, among others. But according to the Milken survey, the state had just one-third the biotech revenue of North Carolina.

Arizona seems like another Democratic target. Obama lost by just 8 points on McCain's home turf, and Janet Napolitano was a popular Democratic governor. Today, Arizona State University, in traditionally GOP-friendly Maricopa County, has been attempting a huge science-based expansion. But the state's embryonic stem cell research ban may be one reason it is in the lower half of the national rankings in biotech revenue. That is a continued roadblock in a state that Democrats find tantalizing in electoral terms. "Maricopa County used to be strongly Republican," Teixeira says. "If Democrats get close enough to win there, they can win in Arizona. Texas is a little further away."

Purple-shaded Missouri, which allows but does not fund embryonic research, is another state to watch. And the battleground states that Obama happened to win, which also fund stem cell science -- Florida, Ohio, Virginia, even Indiana -- remain highly contested, meaning the Democrats could benefit from further creative-class development.

The stem cell skirmishes epitomize the problems that Republicans are having as they grapple with the future. For now the GOP is reaching into its old playbook, trying to energize its base through cultural politics, with no guarantee that the stem cell debate will take place on their terms. "Stem cell research is popular," Gelman says. "That's where the Democrats want the battle to be. The Republicans want the battle to be about abortion." State-level politicians from conservative districts may be staging a rear-guard action that displeases the larger public -- and many Republicans nationally. A Gallup Poll from February, just before Obama's stem cell decision, showed 39 percent of Republicans agreeing that embryonic stem cell research restrictions should be eased or eliminated.

Wedge issues are supposed to split the other party, not your own. Currently the GOP's stem cell opposition seems more like an effort to forestall the kinds of social and economic changes that help Democrats, instead of providing a way forward for Republicans. Indeed, to consider the deep limitations of the GOP's position, ask one question: What if stem cell research does create a major breakthrough? "If stem cells provided a cure for juvenile diabetes, this issue would be a whisper in the wind," says Kelly. For now the battle continues, but it's clear which way the wind is blowing.

Climate change knows no geopolitical boundaries. Increasingly, neither does science. So it might seem that a multilateral approach, one that capitalizes on the increasingly international structure of science, would be the best way to combat the problem. After all, as more researchers from more countries tackle global warming, the greater our chances of developing much-needed technological breakthroughs.

Yet the best route to those innovations may not be globe-wide research and development. It may well be preferable to concentrate such efforts in two countries: the United States and China. Indeed, as President Barack Obama reaches his 100th day in office, a vocal group of scientists and policymakers are calling for an unprecedented bilateral clean-energy initiative between the countries.

“We cannot solve the climate change problem without direct engagement between the United States and China,” says Joanna Lewis, a professor of science, technology, and international affairs at Georgetown University. Lewis also served as the research director for a report on the subject released in February by the Asia Society and the Pew Center for Climate Change, which argues that “the world will take a giant step forward in combating climate change” if the US and China can agree on a common research agenda. Given the political and economic ascendancy of the “fragile superpower,” there is growing recognition that the world has again become bipolar. When it comes to combating major crises, collaboration between the “G2” — the US and China — may be just as, if not more, important than alliances among the wider G-20 group of developed nations.

To be sure, larger global partnerships could help. Many European countries have been leaders in adopting clean energy, and several Asian countries have robust science capacities. Some climate initiatives plainly require widespread cooperation, like the upcoming United Nations Copenhagen summit this December. But battling climate change requires innovation, not just regulation, to foster cleaner economic growth.

With respect to innovation, the bilateral approach confers a number of advantages. The US and China are not just the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases. They also maintain a heavy dependence upon coal, which accounts for at least two-thirds of electricity produced in China, and half in the US. Thus, the two nations share technological needs with each other more than with Europe. Carbon sequestration is one area of research in which the two countries could leverage their complementary strengths. Deborah Seligsohn, China program director of the World Resources Institute, says the US has been researching carbon capture and storage for longer, but that China has more involvement in its commercial community. Indeed, China is already moving ahead on multiple sequestration projects and hopes to first demonstrate the technology at a plant in Tianjin, whereas the United States shelved its similar FutureGen project in Illinois.

A collaboration could also split costs, speed research, and spread know-how in both directions. “I think there is a common assumption in the United States that we would send technology to China,” says Ernest Moniz, a physicist and director of MIT’s Energy Initiative. “But there is a complete lack of understanding of the level of advanced technology the Chinese have developed. We could get a lot more information quickly in terms of large-scale geological sequestration of carbon by collaborating on projects in China.”

Cooperation could prove fruitful in other areas as well. The Asia Society/Pew report suggests joint research into, among other things, wind power, a “smart” electrical grid, and solar power — where China is already the world’s leading manufacturer of photovoltaic cells, with 35 percent of the market.

Some experts are reluctant to endorse specific projects. “I’m a little skeptical about having the governments on both sides picking the technology winners,” says Chris Nielsen, executive director of the Harvard China Project, which fosters scientific collaboration. Nielsen says that “basic research and knowledge development” could be more productive. For one thing, Nielsen believes we need to better assess all the sources of China’s carbon emissions before pursuing top-down plans. From this perspective, however, bilateral scientific cooperation is still a priority.

But would such a partnership alienate other countries? “I don’t see a bilateral approach as a substitute for a multilateral approach, but as a facilitator of it,” says Georgetown’s Lewis. “We need both.” She says there is “much to learn” from places like Europe and Japan that are in some ways more advanced in terms of efficiency, public policy, and adoption of technologies. “But this would be precedent setting,” says Lewis. Others with foreign-relations experience concur. “As a diplomatic measure, if these two countries come to an understanding, it will help lead other countries to do the same,” says Susan Shirk, a professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, and a former deputy assistant secretary of state specializing in Asian issues.

The G2 approach is certainly a goal of some key members of Obama’s inner circle, including Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a cochair of the Asia Society/Pew effort, and two more contributors to the report: John Holdren, Obama’s main science adviser, and Todd Stern, the special envoy for climate change. “Nothing is more important for dealing with this threat than a US-China partnership turning their full attention to it,” said Stern while visiting Beijing in February.

Still, numerous hurdles exist. Intellectual property rights would have to be negotiated if a project aimed to produce new technologies. Although, says Lewis, “you could have a situation where you are doing joint R&D with a joint intellectual property agreement. It’s messy, but we do it all the time. It’s a lot more complicated in biotechnology.” Beyond those agreements, China would have to enforce intellectual property rights, a longtime sticking point among US companies.

Then there are domestic politics. Shirk acknowledges a “legacy of suspicion” of China, in terms of politics, ideology, and strategy: “Some people tend to say we shouldn’t do anything until China does.” That could be an impediment for a consensus-seeking president. Conversely, she asserts that “getting China to move would be broadly appealing in the US,” and could constitute a victory for the White House.

Either way, China appears increasingly ready for action, with President Hu Jintao these days invoking a “harmonious society” that includes environmental concerns largely absent before he took power in 2003. “There is a vision that there’s going to be a new technology future, and China wants to be a part of it,” says Seligsohn. China also released its first climate change strategy in 2007. And while the document spreads culpability for warming among countries, it still outlines many future steps China can take, including “encouraging and recommending China’s scientists to participate in international R&D programs.”

Unlikely as a Sino-American partnership might seem, sheer necessity could ultimately compel the countries to pursue it. “The United States and China need to control carbon dioxide from coal use or frankly, the world cannot meet prudent greenhouse gas concentration goals, given the reality of our being far and away the two biggest users,” says Moniz. Indeed, the United States and China combine to produce 40 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions, according to the World Resources Institute. Russia ranks third, with just 6 percent.

That may be biggest reason of all to pursue the G2 path. The United States can count on European countries to be good global citizens. But as the world’s biggest polluters, the US and China carry the added burden — and the historic new opportunity — to align their interests. In Obama’s next 100 days in office, and on his visit to China later this year, the environment will be high on the agenda. Both countries have taken important recent turns toward grappling with climate change, but the moment is ripe for bolder action. “There is a lot of momentum for this in the US, a lot of people thinking about how to work with China,” says Shirk. “The Chinese are getting the message. The time is right for it now.”

It was 50 years ago this May that Snow, an English physicist, civil servant and novelist, delivered a lecture at Cambridge called “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” which was later published in book form. Snow’s famous lament was that “the intellectual life of the whole of Western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups,” consisting of scientists on the one hand and literary scholars on the other. Snow largely blamed literary types for this “gulf of mutual incomprehension.” These intellectuals, Snow asserted, were shamefully unembarrassed about not grasping, say, the second law of thermodynamics — even though asking if someone knows it, he writes, “is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?”

In the half-century since, “the two cultures” has become a “bumper-sticker phrase,” as NASA’s administrator, Michael Griffin, said in a 2007 speech. (Naturally, as a scientist, Griffin also declared that Snow had hit on an “essential truth.”) And Snow has certainly been enlisted in some unlikely causes. Writing in Newsweek in 1998, Robert Samuelson warned that our inability to take the Y2K computer bug more seriously “may be the ultimate vindication” of Snow’s thesis. (It wasn’t.) Some prominent voices in academia have also refashioned his complaint. “We live in a society, and dare I say a university, where few would admit — and none would admit proudly — to not having read any plays by Shakespeare,” Lawrence Summers proclaimed in his 2001 inaugural address as president of Harvard, adding that “it is all too common and all too acceptable not to know a gene from a chromosome.” This is Snow for the DNA age, complete with a frosty reception from the faculty.

There is nothing wrong with referring to Snow’s idea, of course. His view that education should not be too specialized remains broadly persuasive. But it is misleading to imagine Snow as the eagle-eyed anthropologist of a fractured intelligentsia, rather than an evangelist of our technological future. The deeper point of “The Two Cultures” is not that we have two cultures. It is that science, above all, will keep us prosperous and secure. Snow’s expression of this optimism is dated, yet his thoughts about progress are more relevant today than his cultural typologies.

After all, Snow’s descriptions of the two cultures are not exactly subtle. Scientists, he asserts, have “the future in their bones,” while “the traditional culture responds by wishing the future did not exist.” Scientists, he adds, are morally “the soundest group of intellectuals we have,” while literary ethics are more suspect. Literary culture has “temporary periods” of moral failure, he argues, quoting a scientist friend who mentions the fascist proclivities of Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats and Wyndham Lewis, and asks, “Didn’t the influence of all they represent bring Auschwitz that much nearer?” While Snow says those examples are “not to be taken as representative of all writers,” the implication of his partial defense is clear.

Snow’s essay provoked a roaring, ad hominem response from the Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis — who called Snow “intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be” — and a more measured one from Lionel Trilling, who nonetheless thought Snow had produced “a book which is mistaken in a very large way indeed.” Snow’s cultural tribalism, Trilling argued, impaired the “possibility of rational discourse.”

Today, others believe science now addresses the human condition in ways Snow did not anticipate. For the past two decades, the editor and agent John Brockman has promoted the notion of a “third culture” to describe scientists — notably evolutionary biologists, psychologists and neuroscientists — who are “rendering visible the deeper meanings in our lives” and superseding literary artists in their ability to “shape the thoughts of their generation.” Snow himself suggested in the 1960s that social scientists could form a “third culture.”

So why did Snow think the supposed gulf between the two cultures was such a problem? Because, he argues in the latter half of his essay, it leads many capable minds to ignore science as a vocation, which prevents us from solving the world’s “main issue,” the wealth gap caused by industrialization, which threatens global stability. “This disparity between the rich and the poor has been noticed . . . most acutely and not unnaturally, by the poor,” Snow explains, adding: “It won’t last for long. Whatever else in the world we know survives to the year 2000, that won’t.” (For some reason, Y2K predictions and Snow did not mix well.) Thus Snow, whose service in World War II involved giving scientists overseas assignments, recommends dispatching a corps of technologists to industrialize the third world.

This brings “The Two Cultures” to its ultimate concern, which has less to do with intellectual life than with geopolitics. If the democracies don’t modernize undeveloped countries, Snow argues, “the Communist countries will,” leaving the West “an enclave in a different world.” Only by erasing the gap between the two cultures can we ensure wealth and self-government, he writes, adding, “We have very little time.”

Some of this sounds familiar; for decades we have regarded science as crucial to global competitiveness, an idea invoked as recently as in Barack Obama’s campaign. But in other ways “The Two Cultures” remains irretrievably a cold war document. The path to industrialization that Snow envisions follows W. W. Rostow’s “take-off into sustained growth,” part of 1950s modernization theory holding that all countries could follow the same trajectory of development. The invocation of popular revolution is similarly date-stamped in the era of decolonization, as is the untroubled embrace of ­government-dictated growth. “The scale of the operation is such that it would have to be a national one,” Snow writes. “Private industry, even the biggest private industry, can’t touch it, and in no sense is it a fair business risk.”

This is, I think, why Snow’s diagnosis remains popular while his remedy is ignored. We have spent recent decades convincing ourselves that technological progress occurs in unpredictable entrepreneurial floods, allowing us to surf the waves of creative destruction. In this light, a fussy British technocrat touting a massive government aid project appears distinctly uncool.

Yet “The Two Cultures” actually embodies one of the deepest tensions in our ideas about progress. Snow, too, wants to believe the sheer force of science cannot be restrained, that it will change the world — for the better — without a heavy guiding hand. The Industrial Revolution, he writes, occurred “without anyone,” including intellectuals, “noticing what was happening.” But at the same time, he argues that 20th-century progress was being stymied by the indifference of poets and novelists. That’s why he wrote “The Two Cultures.” So which is it? Is science an irrepressible agent of change, or does it need top-down direction?

This question is the aspect of “The Two Cultures” that speaks most directly to us today. Your answer — and many different ones are possible — probably determines how widely and deeply you think we need to spread scientific knowledge. Do we need to produce more scientists and engineers to fight climate change? How should they be deployed? Do we need broader public understanding of the issue to support governmental action? Or do we need something else?

Snow’s own version of this call for action, I believe, finally undercuts his claims. “The Two Cultures” initially asserts the moral distinctiveness of scientists, but ends with a plea for enlisting science to halt the spread of Communism — a concern that was hardly limited to those with a scientific habit of mind. The separateness of his two cultures is a very slippery thing. For all the book’s continuing interest, we should spend less time merely citing “The Two Cultures,” and more time genuinely reconsidering it.

Right?

That's a question looming larger in American life as genetic testing becomes a mainstream activity. Time named direct-to-consumer DNA exams its Invention of the Year for 2008, following the emergence of companies like 23andMe and Navigenics, which report on your genetic risk of illnesses such as prostate cancer or Parkinson's. Academic medical research efforts like Harvard's Personal Genome Project aim to study the DNA of volunteers, hoping to find genetic links to diseases. So do healthcare providers: In December, California-based Kaiser Permanente announced plans to study the DNA of 400,000 members.

The promise of these tests includes drugs that may someday be tailored to treat your illnesses. The peril is that your personal data could circulate more widely than you expect. DNA provides a rich digital source of medical information, which has great scientific value and lends itself to data sharing. But DNA testing currently involves a lightly regulated tangle of private and nonprofit researchers. Once you take a DNA test, it ceases to be your property. Your genetic data could circulate among insurers and employers, or even data brokers and pharmaceutical companies hoping to profit from it.

"Information can be harmful, and the risks great for individuals," says Patrick Taylor, deputy general counsel at Children's Hospital in Boston, who has written about genetic privacy. Those risks include the loss of a job or insurance -- employers or insurers might not like your DNA profile -- and the disclosure of medical secrets or the creation of family traumas. And with DNA, Taylor notes, "Once it's out, it's out." You can change your credit card number, but you can't apply for a new genetic code.

Your DNA is a kind of spiral ladder -- a double helix -- whose rungs consist of four types of molecules we call A, C, G, and T, for short. We have about 6 billion such letters, which form a code spelling out genetic messages. Within this are roughly 20,000 genes, stretches of DNA that instigate bodily actions.

A genome is a complete copy of DNA, which exists in most cells. All human genomes are similar; we share the same genes. But many versions of those genes exist. The several varieties of a gene called OCA2 can create brown, blue or even non-pigmented eyes. Stretched out over 6 billion letters, almost everyone's DNA has a unique string.

Commercial firms make DNA tests simple. 23andMe sends testing kits to its customers, who spit in a small tube and express-mail it back. For $399, you get data on roughly 100 genes, ranging from the serious (Parkinson's) to the incidental (earwax type), plus membership in the firm's online community. Navigenics offers multiple plans: A $499 fee to look at genes involved in 10 conditions over one year, or $2,500 (plus $250 in each following year) to study a larger sample of predispositions, including some forms of cancer, arthritis and multiple sclerosis. Another firm, Knome, will spell out your whole genome for a six-figure sum. But if the tests sound prohibitively expensive, stay tuned. Sequencing DNA is becoming so cheap we may decode whole genomes for $1,000 before Barack Obama leaves the White House.

Clearly, the medical possibilities are powerful. Currently most drugs are a pharmaceutical one-size-fits-all; they don't work well for everyone. For instance, some lung cancer drugs help only those with certain variants of a gene known as EGFR. Genetic tests could let doctors know which medications to prescribe. "Hopefully 15 years from now, people will be in disbelief that we took drugs and didn't know whether they were going to work for us," says Linda Avey, co-founder of 23andMe. Alternatively, genetics can provide preventive information; Navigenics will assess your predisposition for heart disease.

What's not to like? Well, your DNA can leak into the public arena. Institutions can suffer privacy lapses. In 2005, Kaiser Permanente, the same provider now starting its DNA database, was fined $200,000 by the state of California for allowing lab results concerning 150 patients to be accessible on the Web. And once your data is stored in computers, that creates more "low-tech ways that privacy can be lost," explains Stanford law professor Henry Greely, a skeptic about genetic privacy. "Laptops get stolen. Drives get stolen or lost."

Consumer testing companies and scientists acknowledge that privacy can be problematic. A disclaimer on the Navigenics Web site proclaims: "Navigenics does not and cannot guarantee that personally identifiable information about you will not be accessed by unauthorized persons." The Personal Genome Project goes further. In a warning to prospective participants, a project fact sheet states that anyone donating DNA should have "the expectation of full public data release." Genetic information is so hard to keep under wraps, it continues, that volunteers should disregard "any promises of permanent confidentiality or anonymity." This can happen due to both scientific advances and commercial practices.

To see how science can circumvent privacy, consider biologist James Watson, who with Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA. Back in 2007, a company called 454 Life Sciences charted Watson's whole genome and published it online. But Watson redacted one thing, the DNA surrounding his APOE gene, which is linked to late-onset Alzheimer's. This was personal: Watson is 80, and one of his grandmothers had the illness. Surely even gossip-prone public figures deserve some genetic privacy.

However, in late 2007 a research team from Brisbane, Australia, privately contacted Watson to say they knew which variant of the APOE gene he possessed. Certain bits of DNA strongly suggest the presence of certain other DNA sequences. By looking at the variants Watson had of other genes, especially one called TOMM40, which may help move proteins around the body, the group could deduce his secret. In October 2008, they published their finding, noting it "has considerable relevance to concerns about privacy, confidentiality, discriminatory and defamatory use of genetic data."

In response to the group, Watson blacked out a bigger stretch of DNA from the online database devoted to his genome. That will keep his APOE data private for now. But as the researchers noted, "it will become even more necessary to redact" larger chunks of DNA in the future. As more genomes enter databases, the method will become more powerful.

While genetics marches forward, privacy retreats. In September, the National Institutes of Health shuttered an online database after David Craig, a University of Arizona researcher, identified individuals' DNA in its data. Moreover, we are still learning what all of our 20,000 genes do. If you make your genome public knowledge today, scientists might discover something tomorrow you'd rather keep private.

There are other reasons to keep your DNA to yourself. Genetic testing can unearth painful paternity surprises. Estimates vary, but between 1 and 10 percent of the presumed fathers in the United States are not the biological parents of the children they raise. Once recorded, your genetic information can also be subpoenaed and used against you in court.

In May 2008, Congress and President George W. Bush approved the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) to prevent employers and insurers from using DNA data to deny people jobs or coverage. Most observers applauded GINA, which will take effect this May, but it's a limited measure. A person with an above-average Alzheimer's risk cannot be denied basic health insurance for that reason, but could be denied a long-term healthcare policy, life insurance or disability insurance.

Furthermore, GINA does not apply to the "incidental collection" of genetic data by employers and insurers, an ambiguous term yet to be defined in practice. Many testing companies reserve the right to sell your data. It could end up with employers and insurers in some "incidental" fashion — or parts of your DNA that seem "incidental" now could become relevant later. It's your responsibility to understand the privacy policies of any testing company. Moreover, "those policies are changeable, and you may not notice that," Taylor says. "With all that complexity, who knows what will happen?"

The same uncertainties apply to labs practicing covert genetic testing -- in which, for instance, spouses with paternity or infidelity concerns will send another person's DNA to be tested. "I don't think people realize how much DNA we leave around every day," Greely says. "There is a possibility that if somebody cared, they could get a sample and sequence by following you around." You might leave enough DNA for a test in a glass at a restaurant or office cafeteria.

Meanwhile, your DNA is one of two strands of valuable scientific information you possess. The other is your personal health information. Indeed, the power of contemporary genetics lies in its ability to correlate the two for your whole genome -- though environmental factors and personal habits must be taken into account, too. Ever taken drugs? Been treated for an addiction? Had a sexually transmitted disease? What's in your medicine cabinet? Academic researchers and testing companies will ask for personal information.

That personal data is supposed to be kept anonymous. But anonymity can be flimsy. In the 1990s, Massachusetts put medical information of anonymous state employees in a database. A Carnegie-Mellon computer scientist, Latanya Sweeney, promptly identified the medical record of then-governor William Weld, using only his birth date and city of residence. (Weld was the only person in his ZIP code, in Cambridge, Mass., with his exact birthday.) Most genetic databases figure to have richer information. The more data you provide, the more recognizable it is as yours.

It's for these reasons that the Personal Genome Project essentially tells its volunteers to forget about privacy guarantees. "I like the Personal Genome Project approach," Greely says. "It's honest. They're saying, 'If you want to take the risks, great.'"

For their part, the commercial testing companies swear your data is safe. "The Personal Genome Project is very important," says Amy DuRoss, vice president of policy and business affairs at Navigenics. "But it's fatalistic to believe you can't protect something as important as this data. Navigenics takes the position that we can keep it sacrosanct."

Early-adopting customers tend to agree. "They have every incentive to keep information private," says Blaine Bettinger, a law student and genetics blogger in New York state and a 23andMe customer. "A security breach would be devastating for those companies." Certainly well-funded firms like Navigenics and 23andMe can devote substantial resources to data protection.

Case closed? Not exactly. The testing companies also have partnerships with groups that want your data, from biotech companies to nonprofit researchers. 23andMe just announced one such deal with the Swiss firm Mondobiotech, and has an ongoing project with the Parkinson's Institute; Navigenics is conducting studies with the Mayo Clinic and Scripps Institute. The testing companies will act as a middleman between customers and researchers, in some cases earning a profit by, in effect, arranging the sale of your personal information.

The structure of such deals vary. For instance, Mondobiotech will find research subjects and pay 23andMe to do the testing. In other cases, 23andMe has signaled that they will solicit volunteers for research on behalf of drug companies. "A pharma may come to us and say, 'We would like to recruit people with a certain disease and a certain genetic profile,' and we can become the facilitators of that," explains 23andMe's Avey. It's part of the 23andMe business model. "We think there is value in our database by being able to connect people to the right studies."

To be clear, it's your choice. "We never sell data" without customer consent, Avey says. For personal data, customers consent every time they volunteer for a drug manufacturer's research project. But 23andMe will not notify customers every time they sell genetic data; in that case, a customer's initial consent -- given when first signing up for a 23andMe test -- suffices.

At least some potential customers object to the limited control they have over their data. "I don't believe 23andMe has nefarious purposes," says Diana Gale Matthiesen, a Florida resident who runs a genealogy Web site. "If I were younger, I might be applying for a job there. But certain people might have genes that drug companies could make a fortune off of." After discussing the policy with a 23andMe employee in an online forum, Matthiesen says she will not use any testing company claiming ownership of her genetic data in order to sell it.

Given this downside -- a potential loss of privacy or inadvertent boost to the bottom line of a Big Pharma firm -- who would disclose any personal medical secrets?

Misha Angrist is a professor at Duke's Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy. He suffers from depression and anxiety and recently began taking the prescription drugs Lexapro and Budeprion. He's one of the Personal Genome Project's first 10 volunteers and agreed to have his medical history posted online this fall. Wasn't it difficult to do that?

"I ruminated on it for a while," Angrist says. "And I discussed it with my primary-care physician." They agreed the benefits made it worthwhile, but Angrist's doctor did have a wry suggestion: "She said, 'Stock up on long-term care insurance.'"

Admittedly, Angrist works with colleagues who grasp his medical issues. Would he admit to depression if he were, say, an air-traffic controller? "I don't know," Angrist acknowledges. "That's a difficult question."

But Angrist has well-considered reasons for going public. Treating depression matter-of-factly may help de-stigmatize it. Noting the communities that spring up around illnesses, he says, "The question is how we take that ethos and make it normal."

Then there's the greater scientific good. Donating DNA does more than personalize medicine -- it helps us study common maladies. "Personal genomics promises autonomy in spades," says Angrist. "But how are we going to use it to reduce health disparities and give everyone a fair shake?" Becoming a data point could be one way, assuming that the availability of healthcare expands. Similarly, Bettinger says further DNA testing beyond his initial 23andMe sample "is something I would do to help people."

Doing so may also help us appreciate the complexity of genes. They interact with the environment, switch on and off, and express themselves thanks to larger somatic networks. Genomics may be a powerful tool for studying our bodies, but genes do not write the script for our lives. "Everything we've seen from studies of common diseases suggests we'd better unlearn that," Angrist says. "Otherwise we're not going to understand heart disease, most forms of cancer, diabetes, most forms of Parkinson's."

This is the seeming paradox of DNA: The better we understand our genes, the less important we might find them. "People believe in the magic of genes, and buy into the idea that they are the deepest secrets of our being," Greely says. "Whereas maybe my credit card records come closer to being a deep secret of my being."

If we refuse to be awed by DNA, though, we would be more attuned to genetics and less likely to overreact to it. That wouldn't remove the specific vexations of genetic privacy, but it would be a timely change.

After all, the advent of cheap genome testing could sink us further into the swamp of unwarranted genetic determinism. Our culture is steeped in ideas of genetic authority and in the talk of a gene for everything from addiction to adventure seeking to intelligence. Consumer testing firms, while full of people who emphasize the intricacies of gene expression, depend on this public belief in the power of genes. This is one reason genetic privacy matters: Data that circulates widely is likely to end up with an ill-informed person who believes genetics is destiny. It's why ethicists are still seeking ways to ensure our privacy: Taylor, for one, recently argued in Nature for stricter industrywide controls on genetic data, in which a few administrators could act as gatekeepers, providing access only for valid research queries.

Still, perhaps the highly personal nature of DNA testing will help us form more supple genetic ideas. "The public is set in an older, more determinative view of genes," Greely says. But as we learn more, he suggests, "it's entirely conceivable we'll see genes as independent risk-enhancing or limiting factors, but not particularly important in and of themselves." Surely we're capable of recognizing the complexity of our bodies and realizing that our inclinations, abilities and health are all heavily dependent on the nature of our contact with the world.

Right?

He has also written a perceptive book about science and its civic value, arriving as the White House renews its acquaintance with empiricism. Varmus recounts his laboratory career and tenure as director of the National Institutes of Health, then surveys topical issues like stem-cell research. One implication of this book is that far from disconnecting politics and science, we should find better ways of linking them.

Varmus, who is now president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, starts with his life story and his research. Although his mother died of cancer as his career studying it began, he avoids melodrama and simply gets on with a brisk narrative of scientific exploration. In the 1970s, Varmus and colleagues discovered a series of genes, called proto-oncogenes, that can cause cancer. Grasping the mechanics of this has helped us develop drugs for numerous cancers, including leukemia and lung cancer.

In a modest tone, Varmus places his work within a dense web of related discoveries. Any general reader should emerge better informed about cancer, ge­netics and perhaps the scientific life, which Varmus has found to be highly collaborative. The pleasure of science, he believes, lies in the “balance between the imagination of the individual and the conviction of the community.” If only civic affairs were so harmonious.

Varmus served as Bill Clinton’s director of the National Institutes of Health from 1993 to 1999, gaining plaudits when the government doubled the agency’s budget. Here Varmus calls himself the “lucky beneficiary” of economic good times (and, he might have added, a long-term shift toward funding the life sciences). His account of this period is a checklist of deeds and events, sprinkled with a true scientist’s bemusement about Washington’s power players. Representative John D. Dingell, for instance, “claimed to show his fondness for the N.I.H. . . . by investigating it vigorously and frequently.”

The book concludes with faster-paced chapters on issues including stem-cell science and cloning, as well as global health programs. On stem cells and cloning, Varmus argues forcefully that federal regulations have been too restrictive, and defends the discipline’s practices. “Few arguments can seem as insulting to medical scientists,” he asserts, “as the claim that we are ethically irresponsible when we toil to extract stem cells from donated early human embryos, which would otherwise be destroyed, and use them for beneficial, potentially lifesaving purposes.”

Well, that’s politics. That we can resolve research questions rationally does not mean the moral or economic consequen­ces of science offer a clear consensus. Varmus’s book illustrates this distinction nicely, if not thematically. In recent years, the “politics of science” has been a shorthand phrase denoting political interference in basic research. But other politics of science (there are many) involve its benefits, which are not magically distributed throughout society.

This has been a Varmus concern too, though as N.I.H. director his effort to establish international programs to combat malaria and launch a global “science corps” foundered as a result of turf battles and financing problems. The same question about science’s benefits applies to the United States at a time of new drugs, stem-cell advances and genetic testing. For self-described “left-liberal” figures like Varmus, and for Obama, the unresolved challenge is to pursue a vision of social justice through science while maintaining its bipartisan support. That will require expertise not just in the art of science or the politics of science, but also in the art of politics.

In the 1960s, British biologist William Hamilton offered an explanation in a theory now called kin selection. When animals, often insects, help siblings or other relatives survive, they are enhancing the odds that their shared family genes will be passed on. In other words, the genes, not the individual or social group, are what counts in evolution.

Hamilton's idea was eventually accepted by most biologists, and found an enthusiastic backer, at the time, in Edward O. Wilson, the renowned Harvard evolutionist.

That was then. Now, Wilson has changed his mind, startling colleagues by arguing that kin selection does not lead to altruism.

Kin selection is a scientific crutch, a "very seductive" idea that "doesn't tell us anything decisive about how altruism originated," Wilson says. He adds: "We need a whole new way of explaining things."

He has one. Wilson posits that altruism evolved due more to ecological circumstances than the influence of genes.

In his new book "The Superorganism," out today, Wilson and his co-author, Bert Holldobler, argue that natural selection operates on the group, not just the gene. The lavishly-illustrated volume examines the complex systems that help insect societies survive, from an intricate array of communication signals to the elaborate architecture of nests. But Wilson - though not Holldobler - goes further, saying altruism occurs not because animals share family ties, but because certain altruistic acts have become useful for the overall survival of insect groups.

"The close kinship of the members of these groups is a consequence, not a cause, of their evolution," says the ever-genial Wilson in an interview at his home in Lexington. He believes altruistic (or eusocial) societies developed in ecological conditions where food was plentiful enough to allow insects to practice "progressive provisioning," in which a mother leaves its offspring with food, as some wasps or bees do. This creates a need for others in the insect society to stand guard over the young.

Given these conditions, Wilson postulates, an insect group experiencing a single beneficial genetic mutation - such as the ability to distinguish nest mates from outsiders, a trait many insects possess - might adopt altruism as a useful social behavior.

Many biologists emphatically disagree.

"I have enormous respect for Wilson, he's a huge figure in the field of social evolution and beyond," said Andrew Bourke, a biologist at the University of East Anglia, in England. "But I just think he's got it wrong in this case. Kin selection is the leading theory we have for why animal societies are why they are, and the evidence for it is very strong."

Other scientists profess surprise because Wilson staunchly backed kin selection in the 1960s and 1970s. "We would all like to know what's going on with Wilson," says Francis Ratnieks, a biologist at the University of Sussex, also in England. Even Holldobler, a biologist at Arizona State University who says he and Wilson agree on "95 to 98 percent" of their work, continues to accept the kin-selection theory.

Those who disagree with Wilson suggest he is burdening kin selection with claims it does not make, then saying the theory comes up short. "Kin selection theory never said relatedness was the sole cause of eusocial evolution," argues Bourke. "But it is a necessary precondition."

In a study published in "Science" in May, four researchers (including Ratnieks) found eight separate instances in natural history when altruism developed, leading to the evolution of more than 250 altruistic species. All eight times, the reproducing females had single male partners, meaning the group largely consists of very close relatives as the kin-selection theory predicts.

In response, Wilson argues the paper's authors "didn't have a control" - studying closely-related species that do not become altruistic.

But kin selection advocates say they already believe that highly related groups do not always produce altruism. "There must have been some other factors," said Ratnieks, agreeing that ecological circumstances surely played a role.

For his part, Wilson remains open to discussion. "I would hate to treat this as a closed subject," he says.

But why is Wilson revisiting it?

Wilson says that reviewing the work in the field simply left him skeptical of kin selection theory. But his next project is a study of human sociability, which he thinks may also defy traditional kin-selection analysis. "It's comforting to believe our deep concern for kin must be fundamental to our existence," says Wilson. "And it might turn out to be the case. But maybe we should look at non-kin bonding more closely, such as a brave soldier who throws himself on a grenade to save a squad."

Wilson's intellectual style is one of grand synthesis, linking species and academic disciplines, and he may prefer an explanation of altruism that spans the living world.

Besides, Wilson enjoys an old-fashioned scrap - bringing to mind one of the many vignettes in "The Superorganism." The book describes how, in India, ants of the harpegnathos saltator species often engage in public duels: A pair at a time, they use their antennae to lash and charge each other. Eventually both ants walk away, usually unscathed.

Holldobler and Wilson write that its duels "may serve as a positive feedback loop," raising ant fitness no matter who wins. Perhaps the same applies to evolutionary biology.

You don't have to drill deep into our political discourse to find suspect stories about oil, with politicians peddling the flagrantly false notion that China is producing oil off the coast of Florida, while right-wing activist Jerome Corsi claims oil is not a fossil fuel but "a natural product the Earth generates constantly."

Such declarations serve a political purpose: to make oil drilling seem like an easy solution to our current energy crisis, to marginalize warnings that we are running short on oil, and to stymie efforts at conservation or developing alternatives to fossil fuels.

Along with these high-profile claims, an array of books, Internet forums and YouTube videos constitute a subterranean layer of storytelling, creating a narrative of perpetually cheap domestic oil being denied to us by a dictatorial government. These stories may be working: Offshore oil drilling is now favored by 63 percent of the electorate. But there's another side to them: They reveal our inability to accept that the United States is not always a land of plenty.

"In America, we're a frontier nation, and so the idea is that just beyond the next ridge is the perfect farmland, a giant oil field or an abundant supply of timber," says Robert Kaufmann, director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Boston University. "People don't like the idea that the frontier is now closed and we've got to live within limits."

These narratives also require spectacularly limited scientific literacy about oil: what it is, how we find it, how much remains. Let's take a brief tour of some claims worthy of tabloid headlines.

"Oil is not a fossil fuel!"

What is oil? A wealth of evidence shows it is a fossil fuel derived from ancient marine microorganisms. Essentially, oil comes from plankton fossils that have been covered by sediment at the bottom of bodies of water. Occasionally in such settings -- when there is no oxygen around and the temperature stays between about 120 and 210 degrees for up to a couple of million years -- these fossils become heated into oil.

The upshot: Oil is a finite resource that takes a long time to create, but we use it quickly. So wouldn't it be great if oil were an inexhaustible, inorganic substance? A few researchers, notably Soviet scientists in the 1950s, have tried unsuccessfully to make this case. Corsi, known for his attacks on John Kerry, and now making the media rounds with a loopy book on Barack Obama, also promotes this view. In 2005, Corsi coauthored a book, "Black Gold Stranglehold," asserting that oil is inorganic and abundant, and he continues pumping out related columns at the conservative current-events site WorldNetDaily.

Corsi prefers to cite a lone American academic supporter of the idea: Thomas Gold, the late Cornell astrophysicist and habitual scientific maverick who proposed that inorganic methane shoots up from the earth's mantle into the crust and turns into oil. (Most methane is, like oil, an organic fossil fuel made of hydrogen and carbon.)

Gold never fully detailed how this supposedly happens. And there are other problems with the idea. To name only two: Inorganic methane has been found only in tiny quantities, and it has a specific chemical signature never found around oil deposits. "No one would doubt that inorganic hydrocarbons do occur," says Michael Lewan, a petroleum geochemist with the U.S. Geological Survey. "But the oil we are currently producing is of organic origin."

The evidence for oil's organic origins is robust and diverse. Briefly, it includes biomarkers, or chemical compounds found in both ancient organisms and petroleum formed at the same time; geochemical evidence allowing scientists to match types of oil with their source rocks; lab experiments mimicking oil formation; and literally a world of geological data helping us find oil today.

With that in mind, consider Corsi's level of argumentation in this November 2005 WorldNetDaily article, as he discusses Thunder Horse, a drilling area that BP operates in the Gulf of Mexico:

Corsi makes multiple scientific mistakes here. Scientists never argue that oil comes from "dead dinosaurs and decaying ancient forests." Again, oil derives from fossilized marine microorganisms. The Miocene was not a point in time "24,000 years ago." It lasted from about 5 million years ago to 23 million years ago. In geological language, it's an epoch, not a period, and according to BP, the rocks at Thunder Horse appear to be 5 to 11 million years old. Moreover, oil tends to seep upward over time, so we typically extract it from rocks that are younger than those in which it was formed anyway. Finally, while dinosaur references are irrelevant to oil, basic geological concepts -- erosion, plate tectonics -- explain how any creature might walk on land that later becomes deeply submerged. The National Research Council suggests students should know these concepts by the eighth grade.

Lewan summarizes matters: "I feel that the evidence right now for the organic theory, for our major economic occurrences [of oil], is overwhelming. And the evidence for inorganic sources right now to explain our current discoveries is unsubstantiated."

"China is drilling for oil in America's backyard!"

Perhaps you've heard some GOP politicians recently claim that China is drilling for oil in Cuban waters near Florida. Give credit where it's due: Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, better known for another kind of prospecting in a Minneapolis airport bathroom, was promoting this notion back in 2006. That April, Craig complained on the Senate floor that China could potentially drill in Cuban waters, then released a statement claiming that soon "it may be possible to see Chinese oil rigs from the shores of the Florida Keys."

Actually, in early 2005, Cuba had announced a deal with the Chinese firm Sinopec, apparently for onshore production, but not offshore drilling. But across the country, people like California congressional candidate Tom McClintock see the oil rigs now. "The vast oil fields off the coast of Florida that American law prevents Americans from developing are now being drained by the Chinese government drilling in Cuban waters," he wrote this month in an Op-Ed.

Such claims are bad spin and bad science. They also ignore the geological realities of oil: Exploration precedes production. That means surveying the terrain and drilling test wells -- generally the slowest kind of drilling, since companies like to study the kind of rock they're finding, the types of microorganisms present, temperature and pressure data, and record everything in geophysical well logs. "When you're drilling an exploratory well, it's a geology experiment," says Philip Budzik of the government's Energy Information Administration. The EIA estimates it would take at least five years to begin production in U.S. waters in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, where drilling is now banned. The process often takes longer. Suffice it to say, China is not drilling for oil off the coast of Florida.

How much oil is there, anyway? The EIA says U.S. waters in the area contain 3.82 billion barrels, half our annual national consumption of 7.6 billion barrels. But it would take decades to extract. If the offshore drilling ban were removed in 2012, the EIA states, it "would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030."

"Alaska has more oil than the Middle East!"

Have you heard that there's enough oil in Alaska to supply the United States for the next two centuries, more than in the entire Middle East, but a government plot is keeping it underground? If so, attribute it to Lindsey Williams, a kind of oil evangelist, who's been making these claims since the 1970s.

Back then, Williams coauthored a book, "The Energy Non Crisis," asserting that vast political machinations were preventing oil companies from exploiting Alaska's riches. Today he's on YouTube, saying Alaska has "possibly the largest oil pool on the face of the earth," which remains untapped "by order of the government." New drilling, Williams suggests, will lower gas prices within 12 months. If you like implausible oil stories, this is for you. One of Williams' YouTube clips has been viewed nearly 500,000 times, and a generic version of the story holds that Alaska has more oil than the Arabian peninsula.

Now consider reality on Alaska's North Slope, the oil area that includes the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It can take two or three years to drill a single exploratory well there, because such drilling is only possible for a few months at a time in the winter, when the permafrost is frozen hard enough to support equipment. Meanwhile, infrastructure can be transported there only by ship, in two or three summer months. To drill permanent wells, oil companies lay down a thick gravel "pad," acres in size, which allows for year-round drilling, by keeping equipment and housing safe from summer thaws and preventing them from melting the permafrost. Pipeline corrosion problems have been extensive. The EIA forecasts that if Congress opened up ANWR, it would take eight to 12 years to even start production.

Does this sound like a place that will produce more oil than the Middle East? Alaska is about the same size as Iran, four-fifths as big as Saudi Arabia, and huge portions of the state consist of mountain ranges where drilling is impossible. The EIA estimates that about 10.4 billion barrels of oil can be recovered from ANWR, just over a year of American consumption. Saudi Arabia alone has about 260 billion barrels of proven oil reserves. The verdict here: Get real.

"North Dakota is the new boomtown!"

Forget Alaska. Lately drilling advocates have been dreaming about a lifetime supply of cheap American oil coming from the Bakken Formation, a layer of rock underneath North Dakota, Montana and southern Canada. In April, Rush Limbaugh cited estimates that "175 billion to 500 billion barrels of recoverable oil" are located in the Bakken, meaning it "is expected to be one of the greatest booms in oil discovery since oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia in 1938."

The truth is different. Companies are drilling in the Bakken, but an April survey from the USGS reported approximately 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of oil could be extracted using cutting-edge technology, or about six months of U.S. consumption. Moreover, says Richard Pollastro, a geologist who led the USGS survey, "that's what is technically recoverable, not necessarily what is economically recoverable." Essentially, oil prices would have to increase for companies to extract it all.

The Bakken Formation reminds us that oil is largely found in one place: inside rocks. "People view oil fields as these underground swimming pools of oil, which they are not," says Kaufmann, of the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies. "It's more like an oil-soaked brick." The Bakken Formation consists of a layer of sandstone in between two layers of shale, and the so-called matrix porosity of the rocks -- how easily oil comes out -- fluctuates greatly. "The geologic conditions vary from township to township, county to county," says Pollastro. "You could drill a partial well and have it bring in a half a million barrels of oil, and you can drill one half a mile away and have it bring in 50 barrels of oil." This adds uncertainty to exploration and extraction costs.

That's the catch: Geologists believe there are more than 4.3 billion barrels in the region. But obtaining them would require new drilling technologies, which would demand greater investment. The Bakken hardly heralds a return to cheap oil. Indeed, it suggests America has little cheap oil left. Some discoveries touted today would have produced shrugs decades ago.

"There's a reality out there people don't want to recognize," concludes Kaufmann. "Clearly technology has improved. Oil prices are higher. We deregulated the industry. We've done almost everything. There are a few areas offshore that are closed off. It's not going to make a difference. The sooner people realize that and stop dreaming about energy independence or one huge undiscovered field that's going to solve all our problems, the better off we'll be."

That view of scientists might draw a few wry smiles around Kendall Square today. But it also represents a lingering 20th-century ideal: The scientist as a virtuous academic who pursues knowledge as an end in itself. In contrast to that ideal stands the wealth-seeking industrial scientist, a specialist who merely applies science to the problem of putting new products on the market.

That's the wrong way to think about the whole scientific enterprise, says Steven Shapin, the Franklin L. Ford professor of the history of science at Harvard. In an upcoming book, "The Scientific Life," to be published this fall by the University of Chicago Press, Shapin argues that our notion of the noble scientist untethered by monetary obligations is bad history.

For one thing, corporate America has a long tradition of giving its scientists the freedom to pursue the goals that interest them. More recently, Shapin maintains, private sector America has produced crucial scientific advances while creating new ways of doing research, such as start-up computer and biotechnology firms backed by venture capital.

Shapin finds that the old view is still a common one in academia and beyond: Witness how in the last decade, the race to produce a first draft of a human genome was widely cast as a contest between virtuous government scientists and their corporate competitors, J. Craig Venter and his firm Celera Genomics.

By telling ourselves a myth about science's past, we may be unwisely coloring our own view of its present. Scientists, Shapin thinks, do not merely choose between virtue and riches, instead worrying more about where they can pursue their intellectual goals, and thus open up new scientific frontiers.

Thinking otherwise means we fail to understand the very people whose inventions in medicine or computer science are, Shapin writes, "making the worlds to come."

IDEAS: Are we wrong to think of scientists as academics engaged in the noble pursuit of knowledge?

SHAPIN: Well, I wouldn't deny that there are scientists, just like historians or sociologists, who are interested in following their curiosity for its own sake. What I do end up disputing, and I'm not alone in this, is this picture of who the scientist is, which emerges overwhelmingly from a rather idealized picture of academic scientists. The scientist working in corporate, industrial, commercial, or governmental settings, from early in the 20th century, is far more representative.

IDEAS: Who still believes in this idealized picture?

SHAPIN: If you put to members of the academic humanities or social sciences the question of academia and industry, the presumption is that this is about the unequal distribution of virtue, about threats to the autonomy, integrity, value, and authenticity of science, represented by commercializing interests ... The people who write most eloquently about academia and industry write in defense of academia.

IDEAS: What gives some of these corporate scientists more freedom today than they would have in a university?

SHAPIN: The scarcity of off-the-shelf notions of routine [in modern companies]. How do we organize this enterprise? What do we do? What's of value? ... We are really describing the world of Silicon Valley, Route 128, Biotech Beach in San Diego. If you're a physical chemist at this university, no derogation to Harvard physical chemists, the course of your career, the nature of the institutional environment ... is much more predictable than if you're working in start-up biotech.

IDEAS: Your book claims our image of science as a virtuous calling was shaped by the intellectual currents of the 1950s. What happened then?

SHAPIN: The book hinges on papers by the sociologist Robert Merton, and William Whyte's "The Organization Man." There's a sensibility that comes to the surface in the 1950s, of conformity versus individualism, that has really affected the way science is viewed. "The Organization Man" sees a betrayal of scientific authenticity ... the fundamental individuality and autonomy of the research scientist has not been respected by the cultural and corporate worlds. That's a very American tension between conformity -- and after all it's the period of Levittown -- and the assertion of the fundamental American virtue of individual autonomy. And that's the unresolved tension of the 1950s.

IDEAS: Doesn't being part of an organization sometimes give scientists the spark of creativity they need?

SHAPIN: Absolutely. Or that I need. I mean, I don't work in a team, few historians or sociologists do. But I'm not so vain or stupid to think the creativity I have doesn't come from conversations with others.

IDEAS: Don't people everywhere, including science, make job decisions involving money?

SHAPIN: I have no problem with idea that lawyers or physical chemists might want to have a lot of money. I think what gets lost with these characterizations and accusations is that people want interesting work ... Saying they have a money motive pure and simple, as if this explains everything and somehow sorts people, as if this is why they go into the academic world or corporate world, misses an awful lot of texture and complexity.

IDEAS: What can industry teach anyone in a university?

SHAPIN: People like myself, instead of resisting the imposition of a management ethos, should welcome it. I might like Google a lot more than I like working for certain institutions of higher education. If Google or Genentech are in the business of managing creative people, and if Harvard or the University of California, San Diego, are in the business of managing creative people, what can they learn from each other? ... You could find the experience of academic research extremely constraining. It's not impossible. You could see industry as releasing those constraints.

IDEAS: But isn't this stuff about the uniqueness of Google, letting employees take time to initiate their own projects, partly just a big public relations effort?

SHAPIN: I think the free food is great. The free time goes back to the origins of industrial research.

Carl Zimmer effectively applies this principle in his engrossing new book, "Microcosm," relating the study of these microbes to larger developments in biology and thoughtfully discussing the social implications of science. If you must limit yourself to only one title on bacteria this year, "Microcosm" is a good pick.

As Zimmer explains, a number of landmark discoveries have involved E. coli, including experiments confirming the universality of biochemistry and revealing how genes function. Studying the many strains of E. coli (most are innocuous) suggests something further: the divergent behavior of genetically identical bacteria, Zimmer writes, is "a warning to those who would put human nature down to any sort of simple genetic determinism."

Along with some more familiar material, Zimmer vividly describes the unfamiliar microscopic world of E. coli and their tightly packed, rod-shaped bodies: "If you prick us, we bleed, but if you prick E. coli, it blasts." And unlike mammals, bacteria often swap genetic material, placing limits on Monod's dictum. However, species large and small absorb DNA from viruses. For E. coli and humans alike, Zimmer emphasizes, "there are no fixed essences in life."

"Microcosm" also examines E. coli's contentious public life. Creationists claim its tail-like, propulsive flagellum is proof of someone's intentional design. But at the 2005 trial over the teaching of "intelligent design" in Dover, Pa., scientists showed that the flagellum is not inexplicably complex. The resistance some E. coli have developed to antibiotics (whose limits are given their own slightly disquieting chapter) provides yet more evidence for evolution.

In the 1970s, tinkering with E. coli helped scientists learn to manipulate genes, making the bacterium, Zimmer says, "the monster and the mule" of bioscience — a symbol of fears about genetic experimentation, as well as a workhorse used to make drugs. Here, he calmly finds a middle ground. While these initial concerns have remained largely unrealized, "genetic engineering has fallen far short of the more extravagant promises" about the eradication of major diseases that were offered 30 years ago.

Broadly, Zimmer sees public tolerance for genetic engineering increasing as science further reveals our patchwork genomic cloth. "New research on human evolution," he writes, "makes it impossible to believe that a thing either is or is not a whole human being," as some conservative opponents of biomedical inventions have argued. If our attempts to define a uniquely human core are arbitrary, however, they help us decide how to live. Zimmer thus hopes a debate over genetic engineering will produce a "deeper understanding of what it means to be human: not as an inviolable essence but as a complex cloud of genes, traits, environmental influences and cultural forces."

Desirable as this discussion sounds, is it likely? As Zimmer notes, a bit too briefly, the emergence of biotechnology as an economic force dampened this debate three decades ago. Still, some public advocacy groups remain wary of bioscience, and coming innovations could revive opposition from cultural conservatives, rights-based interest groups and liberals upset at the uneven distribution of these goods. Genetic engineering and new forms of biomedicine could therefore engender a worthy civic dialogue or aggravate old political fractures. Or biotechnology may simply roll on. In any case, Zimmer adroitly links the common heritage we share with E. coli and the emerging horizons of science: "Through E. coli we can see the history of life, and we can see its future as well."

Translated into mass culture, the butterfly effect has become a metaphor for the existence of seemingly insignificant moments that alter history and shape destinies. Typically unrecognized at first, they create threads of cause and effect that appear obvious in retrospect, changing the course of a human life or rippling through the global economy.

In the 2004 movie "The Butterfly Effect"—we watched it so you don't have to—Ashton Kutcher travels back in time, altering his troubled childhood in order to influence the present, though with dismal results. In 1990's "Havana," Robert Redford, a math-wise gambler, tells Lena Olin, "A butterfly can flutter its wings over a flower in China and cause a hurricane in the Caribbean. They can even calculate the odds."

Such borrowings of Lorenz's idea might seem authoritative to unsuspecting viewers, but they share one major problem: They get his insight precisely backwards. The larger meaning of the butterfly effect is not that we can readily track such connections, but that we can't. To claim a butterfly's wings can cause a storm, after all, is to raise the question: How can we definitively say what caused any storm, if it could be something as slight as a butterfly? Lorenz's work gives us a fresh way to think about cause and effect, but does not offer easy answers.

Pop culture references to the butterfly effect may be bad physics, but they're a good barometer of how the public thinks about science. They expose the growing chasm between what the public expects from scientific research—that is, a series of ever more precise answers about the world we live in—and the realms of uncertainty into which modern science is taking us.

The butterfly effect is a deceptively simple insight extracted from a complex modern field. As a low-profile assistant professor in MIT's department of meteorology in 1961, Lorenz created an early computer program to simulate weather. One day he changed one of a dozen numbers representing atmospheric conditions, from .506127 to .506. That tiny alteration utterly transformed his long-term forecast, a point Lorenz amplified in his 1972 paper, "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?"

In the paper, Lorenz claimed the large effects of tiny atmospheric events pose both a practical problem, by limiting long-term weather forecasts, and a philosophical one, by preventing us from isolating specific causes of later conditions. The "innumerable" interconnections of nature, Lorenz noted, mean a butterfly's flap could cause a tornado—or, for all we know, could prevent one. Similarly, should we make even a tiny alteration to nature, "we shall never know what would have happened if we had not disturbed it," since subsequent changes are too complex and entangled to restore a previous state.

So a principal lesson of the butterfly effect is the opposite of Redford's line: It is extremely hard to calculate such things with certainty. There are many butterflies out there. A tornado in Texas could be caused by a butterfly in Brazil, Bali, or Budapest. Realistically, we can't know. "It's impossible for humans to measure everything infinitely accurately," says Robert Devaney, a mathematics professor at Boston University. "And if you're off at all, the behavior of the solution could be completely off." When small imprecisions matter greatly, the world is radically unpredictable.

Moreover, Lorenz also discovered stricter limits on our knowledge, proving that even models of physical systems with a few precisely known variables, like a heated gas swirling in a box, can produce endlessly unpredictable and nonrepeating effects. This is a founding idea of chaos theory, whose advocates sometimes say Lorenz helped dispel the Newtonian idea of a wholly predictable universe.

"Lorenz went beyond the butterfly," says Kerry Emanuel, a professor in the department of earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences at MIT. "To say that certain systems are not predictable, no matter how precise you make the initial conditions, is a profound statement." Instead of a vision of science in which any prediction is possible, as long as we have enough information, Lorenz's work suggested that our ability to analyze and predict the workings of the world is inherently limited.

But in the popular imagination, that one picturesque little butterfly became a metaphor for the surprising way that long chains of events unfold. A SmartMoney.com market analysis from 2007 cites Lorenz, then suggests that hypothetical problems at Sony could affect a string of shippers, retailers, and investors: "One butterfly, in this case a Japanese butterfly, sets off the entire chain." Even applied to society, rather than nature, such claims merit skepticism.

That we imagine the butterfly effect would explain things in everyday life, however, reveals more than an overeager impulse to validate ideas through science. It speaks to our larger expectation that the world should be comprehensible—that everything happens for a reason, and that we can pinpoint all those reasons, however small they may be. But nature itself defies this expectation. It is probability, not certain cause and effect, that now dictates how scientists understand many systems, from subatomic particles to storms. "People grasp that small things can make a big difference," Emanuel says. "But they make errors about the physical world. People want to attach a specific cause to events, and can't accept the randomness of the world."

Thus global warming may make big storms more likely—"loading the die," Emanuel says—but we cannot say it definitively caused Hurricane Katrina. Science helps us understand the universe, but as Lorenz showed, it sometimes does so by revealing the limits of our understanding.

Indeed, Needham's remarkable multivolume work, Science and Civilization in China, upended traditional views of historical development. Gone, or at least receding, was the image of China as a scientific backwater throughout the long arc of history. In its place was "The Needham Question," a scholarly riddle: Given that the Chinese developed so many technologies so many centuries ago, why did their culture of innovation stagnate within the last 500 years, while the West jumped ahead?

That lingering question has helped ensure Needham's legacy since his death in 1995. Now he is the focus of Simon Winchester's revealing biography, The Man Who Loved China. This seems a natural fit for Winchester, who has written extensively about Asia, science, and--in The Professor and the Madman, his book about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary--herculean attempts to assemble and order human knowledge. In Needham, he has a subject who was not only a prodigious scholar but a scientist and Sinophile as well.

The result is a vivid portrayal that enlivens the ranks of the science biography. Winchester depicts Needham as a "bespectacled, owlish, fearless adventurer," a studious academic with a romantic vision of the Chinese. Using letters, notes, and other archival documents, Winchester smoothly weaves together the threads of a life that includes an early period of scientific stardom, an intense phase of cultural exploration in wartime China, and a return to England, where Needham transformed himself into an eminent historian.

Needham's initial career gave few hints about this trajectory. Born in 1900, he was a precocious biologist who became a fellow at Caius College, Cambridge. Needham produced a well-regarded book in 1931, Chemical Embryology, was elected to the Royal Society in 1941, and attracted students from around the world. One of them, Lu Gwei-djen, a biochemistry researcher from Nanjing, China, became Needham's lifelong mistress after arriving in the late 1930s; Needham's wife, Dorothy, herself a biochemist, apparently tolerated the situation due to what Winchester terms a "sexually liberal style of living."

As Winchester tells it, Lu Gwei-djen quickly sparked Needham's fascination with Chinese language, culture, and history, and even deserves credit for "hammering into his head" the idea "that China had made an immensely greater contribution to world of science and technology than anyone in the West had ever acknowledged." By 1942 Needham left for China on a government mission to help Sino-British relations by reaching out to Chinese scientists. He would stay about four years, continually journeying and querying scholars about China's scientific heritage.

These voyages form a cinematic travelogue at the heart of the book, as Needham roams from the East China Sea to the Silk Road, hunting for clues to the country's technological past in texts or structures like bridges and ancient dams. Admittedly, Needham's most bravura travel exploits did not produce his best finds. He uncovered little in a daring trip to Dunhuang, near the Gobi Desert, where in 1907 explorers had found the "Diamond Sutra," a Buddhist document from 868 proving that printing (with wooden blocks) preceded Gutenberg. By contrast, scholars in Lizhuang, a sleepy Sichuan town, simply plied Needham with documents showing China's early development of firecrackers (the 2nd century) and gunpowder (at least 1076, two centuries ahead of the West).

Back in Cambridge, Needham (with assistants) began publishing Science and Civilization in China in 1954, writing 10 of its roughly two-dozen volumes. Here Winchester speaks of Needham in heroic terms, saying the work is "among the great intellectual accomplishments of all time." He is more skeptical of Needham's communist sympathies: Relating Needham's assertion, after a 1952 inspection trip to China, that the United States had used biological weapons in Korea, Winchester says Needham was "pitilessly duped" by Chinese officials.

Almost every biography must achieve a judicious blend of its subject's life and work, but the science biography carries an additional burden of explanation. Good scientific biographies require a vibrant depiction of people who are not instantly familiar to us. We find them relevant because they produced world-altering work, lasting questions, or intellectual communities, all of which deserve elucidation too.

Winchester successfully depicts Needham as a complex and driven man, with enviably diverse talents, boundless curiosity, charm, and a few foibles. And he rightly underscores Needham's view that science and technology are integral parts of civic life, not autonomous forces thrust upon society; he even digs up Needham's 1948 proposal for Science and Civilization in China, which aims to reach "all educated people, whether themselves scientists or not, who are interested in the history of science, scientific thought, and technology, in relation to the general history of civilization." (He might have added that a decade later, C.P. Snow used his own Cambridge experiences to argue that science and the humanities were "two cultures." Yet literally just down the road, Needham was exploring their deep links.)

However, Winchester spends little time substantively grappling with Needham's work, intellectual milieu, or influence, beyond making clear that Needham brought a mountain of new knowledge to the West. Only briefly does he describe a few volumes and their critical reception, noting that Needham "never fully worked out the answers" to his own grand question. If Needham was sui generis, his work created a larger intellectual discussion; minimizing this part of the story seems a pity, and is a bit ironic, given Needham's own interest in the transmission of knowledge. By the 1960s, scholars were contesting various Needham claims (for instance, that the Chinese developed ancient antecedents of wave and field theories). In the 1980s, historian David Landes convincingly deflated Needham's assertion that China's water-powered astronomical clocks were the forerunners of Europe's mechanical time-clocks, underscoring a larger point: That China got there first does not mean the country's innovations begat those of Europe. Winchester does not reference this debate and is inconsistent about this principle, stating China was "possibly the fount of just about everything else important that was known to the outside world," while later agreeing that the Western development of steel, for example, was "entirely homegrown."

While some scholars have therefore questioned the extent of China's influence on the world, or perceive greater differences between East and West than did Needham, these disagreements show why Needham matters. In confronting his work, especially "The Needham Question," we are forced to define science across cultures, say how it relates to technology, and consider how each is entangled with political, economic or religious forces.

Thus one might accept, as Winchester does, Needham's claim that China once produced "fifteen major inventions a century." Or not: Which inventions count, and why? Similarly, after Needham, some scholars have attributed China's scientific stagnation to the lack of state competition Europe had. Others have recast the issue by arguing that China possessed technology but never enjoyed a tradition of math-based scientific inquiry. In either case, discussing Needham's legacy of cross-cultural investigation would have strengthened this otherwise compelling tale and made it more relevant today.

After all, as Winchester notes in closing, China's currently spectacular growth has transfixed the West. In the future, he suggests, the stagnation that puzzled Needham may be "a hiccup in China's long history." Perhaps. In the meantime, his book should stir our interest in China's glorious past.