Product Description

Where do we come from? For thousands of years we really had no clue how living things were created -- great thinkers like Aristotle and Plato had attempted to explain what became known as the problem of 'generation', but neither really had the tools or the insight to solve the mystery. The result was a wealth of weird and wonderful ideas about the components necessary to create new life -- blood, 'vapours', strange pulses in the air. It was also widely accepted that animals could breed different species; the notion that two sheep can only make another sheep is a surprisingly modern idea. But all this confusion changed in a flurry of discovery in the mid-seventeenth century. In just a decade, a group of young scientists in Europe established the existence first of the human egg and then of the human sperm. At last, the building blocks were in place -- although, in one of the great ironies of science, it would be another 150 years before someone worked out how fertilisation actually took place.Focusing on the personalities and rivalries of this extraordinary period, Matthew Cobb has shed new light not just on an under-reported story of science but on our very nature -- and how little we still know about one of the greatest miracles of Nature.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #478693 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Lisa Jardine, Sunday Times
'A fascinating subject, full of arresting material and personalities'

Financial Times
'Lively . . . You can almost smell the formaldehyde on the page'

From the Inside Flap
Where does life come from? What do a mother and a father really contribute to a child? Does like always breed like?

For thousands of years, there were no clear answers to any of these questions, and people believed all sorts of strange things – snakes and mice were thought to appear from dirt, barnacle geese were believed to come from barnacles, and it was widely assumed that women could give birth to cats or rabbits. In this world there was no space for the idea of ‘reproduction’ – there appeared to no rules underlying the generation of life.

But all this confusion was blown away by a flurry of discovery in the mid-seventeenth century, made by a small group of European scientists who used experiments and the newly-discovered microscope to study the mystery of life. In just one decade they showed that like bred like, that all animals – including humans – come from an egg, that there is no such thing as spontaneous generation, and that there are millions of tiny wriggling ‘eels’ in semen. At last, the building blocks for understanding how reproduction occurs were in place. But in one of the great ironies of science, it would be another 150 years before the full meaning of their findings became clear.

Focusing on the very human stories underlying this decade of fertility, The Egg and Sperm Race describes these discoveries in clear and accessible terms, highlighting the rivalries and friendships of the men who carried out this work and showing the links between science and culture in the tumultuous years of the 1660s and 1670s. Endlessly fascinating and written with wry and engaging humour, it also shows the many detours, side-roads and dead ends that lie along the path to knowledge.

Customer Reviews

Where do we come from?
What a splendid book!

Although almost everyone seems to get the hang of the preliminaries, understanding how an act of passion can lead to a new life nine months later is rather a challenge.

Shakespeare for example, might have been good at explaining 'love', but neither he nor any of his contemporaries had a clue about the biological process that brings us into the world. It's not surprising, really - the action happens out of sight and involves bits and pieces that are undetectable without a sophisticated microscopes.

This led respected scientists to some remarkable conclusions. For example, it was held that mice could be generated by putting a dirty shirt and some grains of wheat into a bottle; women were widely thought as able to produce rabbits and kittens as bouncing babies. Leonardo da Vinci drew a detailed anatomical diagram of a couple having sex, but his understanding of their internal wiring seems fanciful.

Then, in the 1660s and 1670s, a colourful group of scientists in Holland, collaborating and bickering by turn, started to make significant breakthroughs.

Matthew Cobb's challenge is to make this story accessible. He needs to give the reader enough science to handle some challenging concepts, fix the key players in a historical context that it as at once familiar and very distant, and also put flesh on the bones of characters for whom there is little hard evidence. For the most part, he handles this with some skill, not least when his own enthusiasms show through (Cobb teaches zoology at the University of Manchester and knows more about fruit flies than most would admit).

Almost every page reveals some astonishing fact, and he is good on highlighting striking details. Eventually the story comes to the point at which one of the scientists comes to the conclusion that "all insects proceed from an egg, that is laid by an insect of the same species." Cobb observes that with this statement Jan Swammerdam propelled the whole of natural history into the moden world. It is quite a claim, but without this understanding it is hard to see key areas of practical or theoretical science developing.

Establishing how these processes occur was still shrouded in mystery, but gradually, through skillful dissection and rigorous observation, the function and operation of various organs began to emerge.

Needless to say, the final impression his story leaves is one of wonder. Most 21st Century readers who smile at the idea of spontaneous generation, who cannot accept that a woman's laid in a damp sunny place will turn into snakes, will still admit to a sense of awe that the bizarre process Swammerdam, de Graaf, Leeuwenhoek and others uncovered really does works. It is where we come from, too.

Highly recommended.

an amazing read
I was very impressed to find that a book written about a subject that is really no where near my own academic interest (namely being linguistics) can be written in such an accessible and exciting way.

If you don't read this book you miss out on a great experience.

Winning with gametes
This is a wonderful, scholarly yet highly readable book. The struggle to discover the existence of sperm and ova and how they fuse to form a new individual makes compelling reading. Cobb does a superb job.