100 Best Molecular Biology Books of All Time

Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.

Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia — a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo — to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.

Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family — past and present — is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.

Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother’s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance?

Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.

To explain the mystery of how life evolved on Earth, Nick Lane explores the deep link between energy and genes.

The Earth teems with life: in its oceans, forests, skies and cities. Yet there’s a black hole at the heart of biology. We do not know why complex life is the way it is, or, for that matter, how life first began. In The Vital Question, award-winning author and biochemist Nick Lane radicall

For two and a half billion years, from the very origins of life, single-celled organisms such as bacteria evolved without changing their basic form. Then, on just one occasion in four billion years, they made the jump to complexity. All complex life, from mushrooms to man, shares puzzling features, such as sex, which are unknown in bacteria. How and why did this radical transformation happen?

The answer, Lane argues, lies in energy: all life on Earth lives off a voltage with the strength of a lightning bolt. Building on the pillars of evolutionary theory, Lane’s hypothesis draws on cutting-edge research into the link between energy and cell biology, in order to deliver a compelling account of evolution from the very origins of life to the emergence of multicellular organisms, while offering deep insights into our own lives and deaths.

Both rigorous and enchanting, The Vital Question provides a solution to life’s vital question: why are we as we are, and indeed, why are we here at all?

Scientific American covers the most important and exciting research, ideas and knowledge in science, health, technology, the environment and society. It is committed to sharing trustworthy knowledge and enhancing our understanding of the world .

One of Publishers Weekly’s Top Ten Spring 2013 Science Books

Philadelphia, 1959: A scientist scrutinizing a single human cell under a microscope detects a missing piece of DNA. That scientist, David Hungerford, had no way of knowing that he had stumbled upon the starting point of modern cancer research—the Philadelphia chromosome. This book charts not only that landmark discovery, but also—for the

Scientific American covers the most important and exciting research, ideas and knowledge in science, health, technology, the environment and society. It is committed to sharing trustworthy knowledge and enhancing our understanding of the world .

Scientific American covers the most important and exciting research, ideas and knowledge in science, health, technology, the environment and society. It is committed to sharing trustworthy knowledge and enhancing our understanding of the world .

For two hundred years a noble Venetian family has suffered from an inherited disease that strikes their members in middle age, stealing their sleep, eating holes in their brains, and ending their lives in a matter of months. In Papua New Guinea, a primitive tribe is nearly obliterated by a sickness whose chief symptom is uncontrollable laughter. Across Europe, millions of sheep rub their fleeces r

In 1953 Watson and Crick ignited the genetics revolution with their discovery of the double helix. Today a second revolution is underway thanks to the discovery of DNA’s mysterious partner in the elegant waltz of cellular life—the epigenome. The sophistication of that dance is astonishing researchers and upending the genetic paradigm. Epigenetics and the Architect explores the latest in this unfol

"Utterly fascinating." —Bill Bryson"An incredible journey." —Siddhartha Mukherjee*WINNER OF THE 2025 ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN PUBLISHERS PROSE AWARD FOR BEST BOOK ON BIOLOGY**2025 NAUTILUS BOOK AWARDS GOLD WINNER FOR SCIENCE AND COSMOLOGY*A groundbreaking exploration of the science of longevity and mortality—from Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist Venki RamakrishnanThe knowledge of death is so

For the past 17 years, the author, a PhD in life sciences, has studied the amino acid glycine and its effects on the human body. This research has made clear to him that due to the typical Western diet, virtually all Americans suffer from an insufficient level of glycine, and this has resulted in a misunderstanding by the medical community of the natural function of inflammation as a proper respon