About the Book
His scientific career spanned four decades of rapidly expanding progress in experimental biology, accelerated by the DNA revolution of the 1980s. His life story shows how the unique personalities, joys, and sorrows of individual scientists shape their science. Find out how their discoveries are driven by warm cooperation and painful competition, combined with the viscerally satisfying delight of solving nature’s puzzles, as you unravel Bourne’s Ambition and Delight.
Follow scientist-author Henry Bourne as he steps back into his past to revisit some wonderfully vivid memories. Accompany him in his growing up years, his memories of medical school, his two years at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), his learning a new game – clinical pharmacology, his new philosophy on experiments, his own laboratory, his appointment as a Chairman of the Department of Pharmacology, and more.
Enter author Henry Bourne’s life in experimental biology as he tells all his Ambition and Delight in this book that would captivate both non-specialist readers and scientists. What makes this really engaging is that he writes on the interface between personal feelings and thoughts and scientific discovery.
“This superb book presents science at its best, warts and all. Bourne beautifully interweaves personal experience, scientific insights and mistakes to reveal the extraordinary variety of personalities and styles that contribute to the scientific endeavor. Ambition and Delight will be especially interesting to students in high school, college, medical, and graduate school, and to anyone who wants to learn what drives, fascinates, and rewards science as practiced today.”
—Eric Kandel, co-recipient of a Nobel Prize for explaining mechanisms underlying learning and memory, University Professor and Kavli Professor, Columbia University
“An engaging and honest account of discovery and scientific camaraderie, mixed with personal uncertainties, competition, disappointment, and even betrayal. Bourne’s literary skills and humane sympathies make this a compelling story that will interest scientists and non-scientists alike---a story that also offers important lessons for those students drawn to the medical sciences, one of the great intellectual adventures of our time.”
—Harold Varmus, co-recipient of a Nobel Prize for discovery of oncogenes, and President, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
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ISBN13 (TP) 978-1-4415-1931-3
ISBN13 (HB) 978-1-4415-1932-0