All links given in red will work offline. For the blue links to work you will have to be on-line.
From "Biology Today": "Dr. Kirk is the person who put this book together. In a weak moment (he has since said that all book builders are mad), he agreed to help draw up a blueprint for the second edition of Biology Today" (1972, 1975)
This essay covers my personal story, that began early in the 1960th after having studied biology at the Universities of Tuebingen and Munich, after writing my thesis at the Max-Planck-Institute of Biology in Tuebingen, and gaining postdoctoral experiences at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge/England, The University of Wisconsin at Madison, and The Salk Institute for Biological Studies at La Jolla. It was the great time of the rise of Molecular Biology - and my first attempt to produce a thesis trough solving the genetic code failed.
While staying in Tuebingen, Cambridge, Madison, La Jolla and later in Heidelberg, I had the opportunity to meet most of the first generation scientists of molecular and cell biology. I first heard about the structure and importance of the DNA in a lecture given by G. SCHRAMM in Tuebingen in 1959 (he became famous for the discovery that RNA carries genetic information in some viruses, he developed the "phenol method" for nucleic acid isolation and revealed the mechanism of nitic acid as a mutagen). That water is split in the process of photosynthesis, I learned in 1960 from H. GAFFRON famous for the discovery of light-traps and the importance of antenna pigments in photosynthesis. I came to understand the structure of the lysozyme, when I, as a guest, attended an outstanding lecture held in 1966 in a traditional, "typical British" manner by D. PHILLIPS for the members the Royal Institution of London. These few cases show, that personalities have the greatest impact in the teaching of science.
During my stay in La Jolla, I became interested in science politics and teaching. When returning to Heidelberg, Germany, significant changes of the German University system took place. Together with a few collegues, who had also just returned from their postdoctoral studies in the USA we suggested a new biology curriculum for the University of Heidelberg. After extensive consultations with all faculty members, the plan was accepted by the faculty board - and is still in operation today. Since it was our believe, that science, too, had to be supported, we though it might be a good idea to offer a home to the European Molecular Biology Organization for their proposed laboratory in Heidelberg. The EMBO and EMBC comittees accepted and the EMBL became one of the Europe's major research centers. For a detailed report see: The Conception of a European Laboratory for Molecular Biology: 1962-1974
"Germany entered the competition in 1970, offering several potential sites, plus twelve million DM for capital expenditures. During this time, two scientists from Heidelberg, Hermann Bujard and Peter von Sengbusch, were working to establish their city as a home for EMBL. Heidelberg had an excellent university, a recognised cancer research centre (the DKFZ), as well as Max Planck Institutes for Medicine and Physics in the vicinity. The latter was adjacent to the proposed site and willing to share its workshop facilities. Heidelberg was also ideally located: 5-6 hours by train to Amsterdam, Paris, Milan, Vienna and Berlin, shorter trips to the pharmaceutical centres of Basel and Mannheim, and an hour's drive from the Frankfurt airport. In 1971, the Conference and German Government agreed in principle on Heidelberg as a site for the laboratory"
After two years of lecturing the "General Biology" course in Heidelberg, the Springer-Verlag asked me to write a textbook on general biology (in German) to be based on the new concepts of biology teaching. I wrote the book after thorouly studying the new generation of American textbooks - and the flagship of new information "Scientific American". Before writing a textbook, I considered it essential to consult the books of contemporary textbook authors and authors of standard works, especially the prefaces, since they reveal, why an author started such an endeavour, who encouraged him and who suffered from his performance (usually his family).
In doing so, I did not just learn how to present the classic topics of biology, like zoology and botany but how to convert own experiences and the ideas of prominent scientists who discovered fundamental concepts into teaching units. Converting knowledge into textbooks or other standard books was a challenging task during those years. The September 1961 issue of Scientific American became the "bible" of cell biology. The cell was portrayed in a new way. Many textbook-authers in forthcoming years used this picture as a pattern. We all had to modify it for copyright reasons, but you can find variations in the textbooks of KEETON, KIMBALL, in my textbook and many others. P. HANDLER used one of the KEETON variations in "Biology and the Future of Man". This graphical representation based on the electron microscopic analysis of the cell is very informative, but even in the 1960th more impressive ways to design models of scientific results were known and in use. Coloured illustrations, giving a 3-D-impression of the liver cell, the mitochondrion, the golgi apparatus and the endoplasmic reticulum, were published in the "Life-Science Library", but it took more than ten years before comparable pictures were used in textbooks. In the same issue, photos of an acryl model of the DNA and its replication (before OKAZAKI) were published. Probably more than 150 versions of the model appeared in the textbook literature thereafter, all more or less showing the same, but each publisher had to insist on a new graph, because former textbook-authors and their publishers were copyright-holder of their versions.
As said before, I was most impressed by HANDLER's "Biology and the Future of Man", and the outline given became a "Leitfaden" in many of my future teaching activities. His key statement that
"....the biologist does not use distinctively biological tools : He is an opportunist who employs a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer, a telemetry assembly, or an airplane equipped for infrared photography, depending on the biological problem he is attacking ..."
I used as a preface for my laboratory courses in later years.
Textbook-authors all have in mind to promote science and to use new approaches and concepts to convince students and that it is rewarding to invest time to learn more and more about science. It is a sad consequence, however, that textbooks become "outdated" at an extremely fast rate, although most of the facts, presented are still valid and worth to be taught, classic genetics and anatomy being prime examples. One of the reasons for this quick outdating is the layout and design of the books (due to interests of the publishers), black-and-white drawings and few photographs (interestingly enough, many electon microscopic photos) dominated during the 1960th and up to the middle of the 1970th. After that, coloured illustrations became popular - and now, of course, there is no way avoiding multimedia internet presentations.
In order to give you an outline of the history of textbooks, I have linked a few prefaces to this text, while giving you here only the first paragraphs. I want to point out that the ideas behind writing textbooks in the 19th and in 20th century remained the same. - I collected and used a few examples from German textbooks in the preface of my Botany Textbook, that finally developed into our project "Botany online - The Internet Hypertextbook".
The following statements provide you with key concepts of life science used in the science education projects of today:
1966: Alvin NASON - Associate Director - McCollum-Pratt Institute - The Johns Hopkins University: Textbook of Modern Biology
"We are very fortunate to be living in a wonderful age of progress. The rapid march of science today borders on the revolutionary. It will not be necessary for future historians to look back at our era and designate it as a period of great change for we can see these advances taking place before our very eyes on an almost day-to-day basis, and we are aware that they are the most exciting that mankind has ever experienced. The marvels of atomic energy already have been superseded in our imaginations by the breathtaking vistas of the space age. Artificial planets orbiting around the sun, space ships with astronauts revolving about the earth, and rockets arriving at the moon make it quite clear that travel to our nearest neighbors in the solar system - the moon, Mars, and Venus - will almost certainly be accomplished within a decade. We are passing a boundary of history and all of us already have an inkling of the momentous character of the breakthrough."
1967: William T. KEETON – Cornell University: Biological Science.
"BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE CAN AND SHOULD BE one of the most stimulating subjects a college student encounters. Nothing else, after all, has such immediate personal relevance as the phenomenon of life; and biological science, as the study of life, sheds light on what every individual experiences in himself and observes around him. Given the inherent excitement of the subject, there is no excuse for an introductory biology course to be dull. If large numbers of students in the past found biology a disappointing subject, one seemingly beset with long lists of names and cut-and-dried "facts" to memorize, then the blame must rest with those of us who were their teachers rather than with the students themselves."
1968: Jeffrey J. W. BAKER - George Washington University -- Garland E. ALLEN - Washington University: A Course in Biology
"In recent years there has been a widespread revolution in both the practice and teaching of biology. New curricular reforms have appeared at both the secondary and college levels. To a large extent, the revolution in teaching reflects change at the forefronts of biological research. It is impossible, of course, to define something as complex as a scientific revolution in a brief space. Nevertheless, several characteristics of the "new biology" have become discernible. Perhaps the most apparent of these is the emergence of "molecular biology," the use of biochemical methods for understanding life phenomena. Older problems of genetics, embryology, evolution, cellular physiology, and even taxonomy, have been studied in a new light at the molecular level."
1971: E. A. PHILLIPS - Pomona College - Claremont Graduate School - Rancho Santa Ana Botanical Garden: Basic Ideas in Biology:
"The best reason for publishing a new general biology text is that it represents a departure from its predecessors. This text's major departure from the approach taken by the many others available is the presentation of material in what might he called an "expanded review" style. Material is presented from original journal sources as examples of some principles and concepts of biology. This approach emphasizes the ways biologists make observations and construct experiments, and it presents biology as an ongoing, controversial, self-correcting science. Current work is described with citations of the original literature sources, together with enough added description of the methods and materials used to permit the beginning student to understand what was done and why. Actual experimental data are given with a minimum of interpretation so the student is encouraged to form his own ideas of the significance of the data. Several current controversies that exhibit the tentative nature of facts are discussed, with reasons for the arguments."
The "new" science of "Molecular Bioloy" became more and more prominent in textooks since the beginning of the 1960th. All books mentioned before include sections on "DNA makes RNA makes protein", but a special group of molecular biology textbooks were published, replacing the former textbooks on classic genetics. Interestingly, books from the 1980th center on eucaryotic molecular biology, while procaryotic molecular biology was the major topic in the books published before (although the 3rd edition of J. D. WATSON's Molecular Biology of the Gene in 1975 was already a switchpoint - "Perhaps the most striking aspect of molecular biology today is that it is not slowing down").
1961: Ruth SAGER and Francis C. RYAN - Columbia University: Cell Heredity
"Genetics is the core science of biology. Its ultimate subject matter is a class of chemical compounds, the hereditary determinants, which are the prime movers of cellular metabolism and, thereby, of the even more complex processes of development and evolution. Historically, genetics began with the demonstration of genes which behaved as unit factors in sexual transmission in higher plants and animals. Subsequently, in a great burst of fruitful research, genetics became established as a predictive science dealing with the organization and behavior of hereditary material at the biological level. Genetics is unique in biology for its broad and fundamental theory, and for methods which provide approximate solutions of the problems posed. In the 1930,s it was already possible to build upon the theory of genetics, for example, in the experimental study of evolution, in the analysis of genetic effects upon physiology and development, and in application to plant and animal breeding."
"Today, the science of genetics is coming to grips with the analysis of heredity at the molecular level in studies of the hereditary determinants: their chemistry, the molecular basis of their replication, mutation, and transmission, and the translation systems by means of which they exert their control over all cellular processes."
1965: James D. WATSON - Harvard University: Molecular Biology of the Gene
"THIS BOOK HAS ITS ORIGINS IN A SERIES OF TEN LECTURES WHICH I have given for the past six years to introductory biology students at Harvard. In these lectures, I have not only attempted to convey the excitement of the recent discoveries of molecular genetics, but also to relate this new knowledge to the basic problem of biology - the nature of cells and how they divide. It has, therefore, been necessary to talk about ATP as well as DNA, a feature I have carried over into the text. I am aware, however, that some people may feel that I would have best restricted my discussion to the gene itself, with the expectation that the reader will learn the main principles of intermediary metabolism in another text. This, in fact, was my first intention. When I began to write the first draft, however, I was bothered by the artificial nature of the separation and so decided to start the book with two historically oriented chapters to help the reader see how our ideas about molecular genetics have developed out of the work of the classical geneticists and biochemists."
1971: Gunther S. STENT: Molecular Genetics - An Introductory Narrative:
"In the winter of 1954, Edward H. Adelberg and I began teaching an undergraduate course at the University of California that was supposed to bring the latter-day gospel of molecular genetics to the Berkeley students. It was an extraordinarily gratifying pedagogical undertaking to face an audience of innocents, who had not yet heard of the DNA double helix, and preach to them that a new era was dawning for the understanding of heredity. So enthusiastic were we in those days that we managed to give thirty lectures on what comparatively little was then known about mutation and genetic recombination in bacteria and their viruses. How times have changed! Molecular genetics has since grown from the esoteric specialty of a small, tightly knit vanguard into an elephantine academic discipline whose basic doctrines today form part of the primary school science curriculum. Throughout the period of the well-nigh explosive development of its subject, I have continued to teach this course, and had I not undertaken an annual pruning of the material, the number of lectures necessary to present it would by now have grown at least tenfold. This text presents the present scope and content of that course."
1983: Bruce ALBERTS - Dennis BRAY - Julian LEWIS - Martin RAFF - Keith ROBERTS - James D. WATSON: Molecular Biology of the Cell:
"There is a paradox in the growth of scientific knowledge. As information accumulates in ever more intimidating quantities, disconnected facts and impenetrable mysteries give way to rational explanations, and simplicity emerges from chaos. Gradually the essential principles of a subject come into focus. This is true of cell biology today. New techniques of analysis at the molecular level are revealing an astonishing elegance and economy in the living cell and a gratifying unity in the principles by which cells function. This book is concerned with those principles. It is not an encyclopedia but a guide to understanding. Admittedly, there are still large areas of ignorance in cell biology and many facts that cannot yet be explained. But these unsolved problems provide much of the excitement, and we have tried to point them out in a way that will stimulate readers to join in the enterprise of discovery. Thus, rather than simply present disjointed facts in areas that are poorly understood, we have often ventured hypotheses for the reader to consider and, we hope, to criticize."
"Molecular Biology of the Cell is chiefiy concerned with eucaryotic cells, as opposed to bacteria, and its title reflects the prime importance of the insights that have come from the molecular approach"
James DARNELL - Rockefeller University - Harvey LODISH - Massachussetts Institite of Technology - David BALTIMORE - Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Molecular Cell Biology:
"BIOLOGY today is scarcely recognizable as the subject that biologists knew and taught 10 years ago. A decade ago, gene structure and function in the simple cells of bacteria were known in considerable detail. But now we also know that a different set of molecular rules governs gene organization and expression in all eukaryotic cells, including those of humans. We are learning about the genes and regulatory proteins that control not only single metabolic steps but complicated developmental events such as the formation of a limb, a wing, or an eye. In addition to these advances in understanding the genetic machinery and its regulation, great progress has been made in the study of the structure and function of cell organelles and of specialized cell proteins. To comprehend fully what has been learned requires a reformulation of a body of related information formerly classified under the separate headings of genetics, biochemistry, and cell biology. Molecular Cell Biology aims to present the essential elements of this new biology."
Biochemistry textbooks have an interesting fate regarding the changes in concept and layout. I chose three books from differnt periods.
1966, 1971: Henry R. MAHLER and Eugene H. CORDES - Department of Chemistry, Indiana University: Biological Chemistry
"This book attempts to provide a clear, thorough, and up-to-date treatment of the areas of knowledge fundamental to biochemistry. To this end it presents detailed studies of the physical chemistry of biomacromolecules; of the thermodynamics, kinetics, and mechanisms of enzymatic reactions; of subcellular organization; of the intermediary metabolism of the major classes of chemical substances; and of selected aspects of molecular biology."
1970 (First Edition): Albert L. LEHNINGER - The John Hopkins University, School of Medicine: BIOCHEMISTRY - The Molecular Basis of Cell Structure and Function
"This book is written for students who are taking their first and perhaps their only course in biochemistry, whether as undergraduates or as graduate or medical students. I undertook this task because I want to convey to students my picture of what this science has recently become. Biochemistry is no longer a mere catalog of the biological occurrence and enzymatic reactions of a large number of organic compounds. In the last few years it has acquired, along with many new facts, a set of organizing principles which have made it a much simpler field to comprehend, and, at the same time, a more powerful way of analyzing many important problems in biology."
1975: Lubert STRYER - Yale University: Biochemistry
"This book is an outgrowth of my teaching of biochemistry to undergraduates, graduate students, and medical students at Yale and Stanford. My aim is to provide an introduction to the principles of biochemistry that gives the reader a command of its concepts and language. I also seek to give an appreciation of the process of discovery in biochemistry...." "The elucidation of the three-dimensional structure of proteins, nucleic acids, and other biomolecules has contributed much in recent years to our understanding of the molecular basis of life. I have emphasized this aspect of biochemistry by making extensive use of molecular models to give a vivid picture of architecture and dynamics at the molecular level. Another stimulating and heartening aspect of contemporary biochemistry is its increasing interaction with medicine. I have presented many examples of this interplay. Discussions of molecular diseases such as sickle-cell anemia and of the mechanism of action of drugs such as penicillin enrich the teaching of biochemistry. Finally, I have tried to define several challenging areas of inquiry in biochemistry today, such as the molecular basis of excitability."
MAHLER and CORDES's book presents "detailed studies of the physical chemistry of biomacromolecules; of the thermodynamics, kinetics, and mechanisms of enzymatic reactions..." And that's a bit too much for most biology students. LEHNINGER reduces these topics to the essentials, and to some simpler illustrations and photos of space-filling molecular models. Students like it and STRYER finally introduced coloured representations of chemical reactions and molecular models showing clearly that the molecules are 3-D-structures. In the 3rd issue he focussed more on the presentation of macromolecules and cell biology. His problem will be, that all of his illustrations can nowadays be replaced by Chime-skripts in internet projects. The LEHNINGER book is supplemented by Timothy DRISCOLL's Web project: "Biochemistry in 3D - Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry" - One of the few examples that an seemingly "outdated" text of the senior textbook author (he died many years ago) may be supplemented by multimedia-applications if the publisher agrees, and a new author accepts the descriptions and the logic of the former.
Finally, I selected prefaces of a few standard works that became milestones for the presentation of special topics. The arguments in favour of the Darwinian Selection Theory of evolution were stronly supported by applying genetics to evolutionary processes. This period "The modern synthesis" was characterized by a number of standard books by DOBSZHANSKY, DARLINDTON; HUXLEY, HALDANE, STEBBINS and others:
1942 *** 1963, 1974: Julian HUXLEY - M.A., D.Sc., F.R.S.: EVOLUTION – THE MODERN SYNTHESIS
1974: "When this book was first published more than thirty years ago, Professor J. B. S. Haldane wrote of it that 'for many years to come it will be absolutely indispensable for any serious study of the questions with which it deals.' This was true enough; but in 1963 Sir Julian felt it desirable to bring it up to date in a second edition by adding a long new Introduction. The stock of the latter edition has now become exhausted, and the rapid increase in knowledge in the last decade has made it necessary to modernise it once more. It has been decided that new matter should not be inserted in a book that has gained for itself a special place in biological literature. Instead, a team of nine authorities on particular branches of the subject has written another new Introduction, with an accompanying Bibliography. Taken together, the latest Introduction and Bibliography will guide the reader to most of the important advances that have been made in recent years in the study of evolution, while the original text and Sir Julian's earlier Introduction maintain their full value. Among the many subjects discussed at some length in the new Introduction are evolution in our own times, bacterial genetics, the dating of the past, the evidence from chromosomes on man's relationship to particular pongids and what Sir Julian has called the 'psychosocial evolution' of man."
1950: G. L. STEBBINS - University of California, Berkeley: Variation and Evolution in Plants:
"THE last twenty years have been a turning point in the history of man's knowledge and thinking about organic evolution. Great advances have been made in the fields of genetics, cytology, and the statistical study of populations, as well as in the more traditional descriptive fields of systematics and morphology. These coupled with increasing co-operation and interchange of ideas between scientists with different training and background have made possible a far broader conception of the processes of evolution as a whole than any which was open to evolutionists of even a generation ago. There is no need now for seeking hidden causes of evolutionary diversification or evolutionary progress, except in regard to certain specific processes, like mutation. Instead, the attention of scientists has been focused on evolution as a series of problems in dynamics. The direction and speed of the evolution of any group of organisms at any given time is the resultant of the interaction of a series of reasonably well-known factors and processes, both hereditary and environmental. The task of the evolutionist, therefore, is to seek out and evaluate all these factors and processes in respect to as many different groups of organisms as possible, and from the specific information thus acquired to construct such generalizations and hypotheses as he can. This requires the broadest possible knowledge of biology, which, if it cannot be acquired through direct contact with original research, must be built up vicariously through communication with biologists in different fields."
1971 ( Third Edition ): Eugene P. ODUM – Alumni Foundation Professor of Zoology – University of Georgia – Athens, Georgia: FUNDAMENTALS OF ECOLOGY
"Practice has caught up with theory in ecology. The holistic approach and ecosystem theory, as emphasized in the first two editions of this book, are now matters of world-wide concern. People in general have accepted the root meaning of the word "ecology," which refers to the whole environmental "house" in which we live. Thus, to many persons ecology now stands for the study of "the totality of man and environment." Although the same general format which students and teachers found useful in the previous edition has been retained, the third edition is greatly expanded and updated in light of the inereasing importance of the subject in human affairs. All chapters from the second edition have been extensively revised; three completely new chapters have been added to Part 1, and Part 3 has been completely rewritten. Illustrative material and references have been more than doubled, and two-thirds of the figures and tables are new to the third edition."
1970: Paul R. EHRLICH and Anne H.EHRLICH – Stanford University: Population – Resources – Environment *** Issues in Human Ecology:
"It has been our aim to produce a reasonably comprehensive and reliable sourcebook for the study of questions related to population, resources and environment - a book that can serve the needs of teachers and students as well as the needs of general readers who may not be enrolled in any formal courses. We have tried to make clear, by providing adequate detail and documentation, our reasons for sharing with many well-informed and concerned citizens of the world a gloomy prognosis for mankind. We have also tried to include many constructive proposals and suggestions that offer possible means of brightening that prognosis."
1962, 1966: Georg WALD – Harward University *** Johns HOPKINS III – Washington University *** Peter ALBERSHEIM – University of Colorado *** John DOWLING – John Hopkins University *** David DENHARDT – Harward University: TWENTY-SIX AFTERNOONS OF BIOLOGY
"The introductory biology course for which this book is the laboratory manual is now completing its sixth year. It was begun in a period of extraordinary changes, which have since developed further, and show no signs as yet of settling down. Just as the opening years of this century ushered in a revolution in physics, so we are now undergoing a revolution in biology; and that is transforming the entire scientific outlook, for biology no longer develops apart from chemistry and physics, but in intimate association with them. All three sciences come together in the attempt to understand the molecular structure and function of living organisms; and though this is by no means all of biology, or will ever be, it is the great new development. Morphology begins with molecular structure, physiology with chemical reactions; and these initial impulses, pursued to higher levels of organization, suffuse all biology. In the hierarchy molecule-cell-organism, if at times the molecule seems to be given special consideration, that is not because it takes any final precedence, but because its contribution to that trinity is the special task and contribution of our time, and because the molecule lies at the heart of the new unity of science.
My versions of "Twenty-six afternoons in biology":
Biologische Übungen 1: Arbeitsmethoden und Fragestellungen in der Biologie
Biologische Übungen: Stoffwechsel
Summary
In 1966, Gunther STENT wrote in "Science": "That was the molecular biology - that was" - and now ? Collegues at my Institute in Hamburg tease me saying that textbooks will, despite teaching activities using the world wide web, florish in future, too. My answer is, maybe, but will there also be a new generation of textbook authors ? I doubt it, since it is not rewarding any more to begin a new print project knowing that it will be out of date in a few years. The publisher may earn some money, while the author will have to accept a small fee only. Is it still worth it to spend as much time as former textbook authors have ? Publishers do not any more offer any other technique for distributing knowledge that we do not have in schools, colleges and universities. We got a new freedom, we have fun, and we enjoy it as well as the users of our www-files. During the last month, our www-files were visited more than a million times. I presented all about my change from a textbook author to the co-ordinator of a multiauthor hypertextbook at last years PKAL summer institute, see "Virtual Plants? - Enhancing Learning with Information Technology"
Continue to:
What do non-majors have to know ?
What are the advantages of web projects ? - Some case studies
The World Wide Web - The Ultimate Information Source for Teaching Biology