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The Man Who Invented
the Chromosome: A Life of Cyril Darlington Oren Solomon Harman |
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Born by mistake, or
connivance, to struggling parents in a small Lancashire cotton town in 1903,
an uninspired Cyril Darlington escaped the obscurity of farming life and
rose, against all odds, to become the world's greatest expert on chromosomes
and one of the most penetrating biological thinkers of the twentieth century.
Harman follows Darlington's path from bleak prospects to world fame, showing
how, within the most miniscule of worlds, he sought answers to the biggest
questions -how species originate, how variations occurs, how Nature, both
blind and foreboding, random and insightful, makes her way from deep past to
unknown future. But Harman unfolds
Darlington's forgotten tale amid the major events of the twentieth century -
the Nazi atrocities, the Cold War, the crackpot Lysenko,
the molecular revolution, eugenics, Civil Rights, the welfare state, the
changing views of man's place in nature, and biological determinism. Just as Oren Solomon Harman is Lady Davis Fellow
at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Lecturer at |
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