RaveThe Times (UK)... superb ... Subramanian does a masterly job of summarising a rich and rough life. He uses sharp analogies and arresting images ... Haldane deserves a biographer who is eloquent, intelligent, fair, but unsparing and as good at explaining science as politics. Not an easy combination, but he has got one.
Gareth Williams
RaveThe Times (UK)Gareth Williams...has woven a truly superb narrative from short biographies of all the scientists who contributed to, and in some cases just missed out on, the epochal discovery that the secret of life is a digital linear code written on DNA ... Many of these stories of scientific also-rans and near-misses are well known. Others are not. Despite being Crick’s biographer, I did not know the story of Beighton’s photographs, nor had heard of Gulland. By choosing to fill in the gaps in conventional accounts, Williams has done a good job of telling the whole story of science’s greatest discovery. He has done it with fluency and a real feel for narrative.
