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

Max F. Perutz

ISBN 10: 019859027X / ISBN 13: 9780198590279

Published by Oxford University Press, 2002

Seller Inventory # U9780198590279

Synopsis:

Science does not offer a quiet life. Imagination, creativity, ambition, and conflict are as vital and abundant in science as in artistic endeavours. In this delightful collection of essays, Nobel Laureate Max Perutz writes about the pursuit of scientific knowledge, which he sees as an enterprise providing not just a few facts but cause for reflection and revelation. This book contains detective stories, tales of conflict and battle, a woman's love affair with crystals, a man's gruesome fascination with poison gas, perils both phantom and real, and entertaining glimpses of Perutz's own long and exceptional life. Perutz views science as a passionate enterprise and the pursuit of knowledge as a sortie into the these essays explore a remarkable range of topics, both scientific and personal, with the lucidity and precision that he brought to his own pioneering work in protein crystallography.

Review: 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

Bibliographic Details

Title: I Wish I'd Made You Angry Earlier: Essays on...
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publication Date: 2002
Binding: Soft cover
Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: 41850448
Signed: 4/20/2026 12:27:12 PM
Edition: 1776688032.