I Wish I'd Made You Angry Earlier: Essays on Science, Scientists, and Humanity

Science is no quiet life. Imagination, creativity, ambition, and conflict are as vital and abundant in science as in artistic endeavors. In this collection of essays, the Nobel Prize-winning protein chemist Max Perutz writes about the pursuit of scientific knowledge, which he sees as an enterprise providing not just new facts but cause for reflection and revelation, as in a poem or painting. Max Perutz's essays explore a remarkable range of scientific topics with the lucidity and precision Perutz brought to his own pioneering work in protein crystallography. He has been hailed as an author who "makes difficult subjects intelligible and writes with the warmth, humanity, and broad culture which has always characterized the great men of science." Of his previous collection of essays, a reviewer said "They turn the world of science and medicine into a marvelous land of adventure which I was thrilled to explore in the company of this wise and human [writer]." Readers of this volume can journey to the same land, with the same delight. Max Perutz (1914-2002) was a brilliant scientist, a visionary of molecular biology, and a writer of elegant essays infused with humanity and wisdom. This expanded paperback edition of his very successful book I Wish I'd Made You Angry Earlier contains nine additional essays, and a warmly evocative portrait of Max by his friend and professional colleague Sir John Meurig Thomas. The original hardcover edition of this book was co-published with Oxford University Press. A paperback edition is also available from Oxford University Press. The expanded paperback edition is only available from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press.

Max Perutz is an extraordinary scientist. After training in chemistry at the University of Vienna during the 1930s, he went to Cambridge and became fascinated by biochemistry just as that discipline was becoming ripe for conquest by scientific heroes. He knew and worked with many of them: William Bragg, J.D. Bernal, Crick and Watson--and became one himself, through his discovery of the structure of hemoglobin, which led to his Nobel Prize in 1962.

Such are the credentials Perutz brings to this wonderful collection of essays, credentials that he uses always to illuminate, never to dominate. In prose that rolls by like countryside seen from the window of a train, Perutz takes the reader traveling through his own life and that of many other leading scientists, giving fresh insights into the workings of first-rate minds.

We meet such characters as Leo Szilard, the inventor of the atomic bomb, who devoted his life to preventing its use, and the German chemist Fritz Haber, the very mirror image of Szilard, who became a real-life Faust. We also learn much about Perutz's own approach to science--including his involvement in a project to harness icebergs in the fight against the Nazis.

With its combination of subject choice and light, often humorous, style, this is one of the best collections of scientific essays to emerge for years. --Robert Matthews, Amazon.co.uk