Asking About Life

Asking About Life is an introductory biology textbook for first-year college students and other interested readers. The strengths of the book include engaging stories about the process of science, an emphasis on experimentation, and stylish prose. It is unusually current for an introductory text, and has a striking art program. The authors, a distinguished research scientist and a professional science writer, use a unique approach to biology that emphasizes questions, experimentation, and principles as well as the human drama that has allowed scientists to arrive at these principles. The text introduces biology as an engaging human quest fraught with conflict and illuminated by discovery. The authors accomplish this by telling stories of individuals struggling against ignorance, ideology, and other barriers to understanding. This new approach brings to the classroom the human drama needed to sustain student interest, without the dreary emphasis on disease and suffering that some biology textbooks use as a "human" approach. Subjects for profile range from outspoken mavericks such as Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis and immunologist Polly Matzinger to quiet and tenacious researchers such as geneticist Barbara McClintock and Charles Darwin. The profiles feature scientists whose flaws, passions, and independence play a significant role in the way they do science. In this way, Asking About Life shows that science is a social endeavor and that discoveries may hinge on which researchers work in groups and which ones work in isolation. This approach to teaching biology gently engages the reader in the process of doing science and humanizes both biologists and biology. Asking About Life also emphasizes that science is primarily a series of questions. The way in which biologists ask questions and attempt to answer those questions is the book's central theme. Each chapter is structured around a series of questions and answers that engage the reader step by step in the process of discovery. Readers learn that sometimes the greatest contribution a scientist can make is not the answer to an important question, but the question itself. The authors of Asking About Life ask: What questions have the most engaged biologists argued about in the past? How have past controversies led to our current understanding of biology and to the questions that fascinate today's biologists? Finally, they ask, what are the important unanswered questions in biology? In keeping with this emphasis on asking and answering questions, Asking About Life describes the experiments that provided the answers to important questions in biology. Students who have learned the experimental underpinnings of current concepts are in a better position to assimilate new information as it emerges(whether in later classes or in the daily news. Asking About Life is unusually current for an introductory text, using up-to-date examples throughout and grappling with topical issues such as gene therapy, the cloning of humans, the role of dietary salt in hypertension, and the role of nicotine in heart disease. These examples engage not only the student but the instructor as well. The authors operate from the premise that when an instructor is intellectually engaged with the text, students benefit.

Allan J. Tobin is Director of the UCLA Brain Research Institute. He holds the Eleanor Leslie Chair in Neuroscience at UCLA, where he is both Professor of Neurology and Professor of Physiological Science. Tobin is also Scientific Director of the Hereditary Disease Foundation (HDF), where he helped organize the consortium that identified the gene responsible for Huntington's disease. Both at UCLA and at HDF, he has encouraged the application of cell biology and molecular genetics to disorders of the brain.

Tobin's undergraduate degree is in literature and biology (MIT, 1963), and his doctoral degree is in biophysics, with an emphasis on physical biochemistry (Harvard, 1969). Tobin did postdoctoral work on cell surface molecules at the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Israel, and on red blood cell development at MIT. At UCLA, he has an active research laboratory that studies the production and action of GABA, the major inhibitory signal in the brain. These studies may eventually lead to new therapeutic approaches to epilepsy, Huntington's disease, and juvenile diabetes. Tobin is the recipient of a Jacob Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

For more than 25 years, Tobin has taught introductory courses in cell biology, molecular biology, developmental biology, and neuroscience. He is the recipient of a Faculty Teaching and Service Award and is regarded as an excellent and highly interactive teacher.