Life's Greatest Secret (49 page)

If you want to know what happened before this story begins, you should read my earlier book,
The Egg and Sperm Race: The Seventeenth Century Scientists Who Unravelled the Secrets of Sex, Life and Growth
(published in the US as
Generation).

This book owes a debt to the scholarship of the late Lily E. Kay, whose
Who Wrote the Book of Life?
provided me with inspiration and acted as a pathfinder. As the dedication indicates, my friend and colleague Professor John Pickstone died before he could subject the manuscript to his incisive criticism. We talked about the book several times over coffee or a pint as I was planning and writing it, and John’s insight and good humour always cheered and helped me.

My agent, Peter Tallack, and my London publisher, John Davey, were enthusiastic and attentive during the pitching and the writing, respectively. John’s careful edits have improved the manuscript no end, and at his suggestion we visited the King’s College Archive and were able to handle the camera that took the notorious photo 51 (see Chapter 6). Bruce Goatly edited the copy with great efficiency and also rescued me from some howlers that will remain our secret. Picture researcher Lesley Hodgson gathered the illustrations with aplomb. Penny Daniel ensured that the passage from manuscript to printed page went smoothly, and was tolerant of my changes to the proofs.

My thanks go to my friends, colleagues, folk on Twitter and people whom I contacted out of the blue by e-mail, all of whom helped me in all sorts of ways, providing information, encouragement, articles, and in the case of Jerry Hurwitz an eye-witness account of the moment that Marshall Nirenberg told the world that the genetic code had been cracked: Tom Avery, Stuart Bennett, Casey Bergman, Sam Berry, Dave Briggs, Thony Christie, Dan Davis, Jerry Hurwitz, Nick Lane, Richard Lenski, Florian Maderspacher, Bjorn Poonen, Brian Sutton, Alex Wellerstein, Michael Wells and Vivian Wyatt. Alok Jha (then of
The Guardian
), Steve Mao of
Cell
and Geoff North of
Current Biology
were all generous enough to allow me to sketch out my ideas through articles in their publications. Jerry Coyne encouraged me to post material on http://whyevolutionistrue.com, and the readers’ comments helped me clarify my ideas. Similarly, the students on Carsten Timmerman’s University of Manchester course
A History of Biology in 20 Objects
have been guinea pigs for some of my arguments. When it came to reviewing the manuscript, Jerry Coyne, Stephen Curry, Larry Moran, Michel Morange, Adam Rutherford, Ulrich Stegmann and Leslie Vosshall all generously provided extremely useful comments on chapter drafts. The errors and omissions that remain are my fault, of course.

While I wrote this book, my close family had to face a variety of life-changing events – PhD completion, university entry, major depression and vascular dementia. I am sure that when I was researching and writing, I was not as attentive to the needs of my loved ones as I ought to have been. My apologies to you all. Books have a price for writers’ families, too.

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