What Mad Pursuit : A Personal View of Scientific Discovery
New York: Basic Books 1988. First Edition. xiii, 182 pages. Publisher's blue cloth in yellow printed dj. Spine panel faded (as normal). SIGNED by molecular biologist Leonard Lerman on the half title page. Small stain to foreedge. A rather well read copy. Very Good / Good. Cloth. [23414]
Crick's own account of the discovery of the structure of DNA, some 20 years after Watson's published account. Leonard Lerman was an MIT Professor who while not a household name did make significant contributions to genetics. His NY Times obituary does a nice job of summarizing his impact: "Although he did not publish his first paper on the topic until 1961, Dr. Lerman took these insights with him when he went to the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, in 1959 for a sabbatical year to work with Sydney Brenner and Francis Crick. It was at this lab in 1953 that Dr. Crick and James Watson discovered the double helix structure of DNA, the building blocks of genetic material. By this time, Dr. Brenner and Dr. Crick were trying to determine how many nucleotides in strands of DNA encoded each amino acid, the building blocks of proteins. Dr. Lerman’s experiments provided support for their hypothesis that they could mutate DNA by adding or deleting nucleotides. Their subsequent experiments enabled them to establish that groups of three nucleotides were the key to the code. In his essay “Masters of DNA,” which gave a history of these discoveries, Sidney Altman, a student of Dr. Lerman’s who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1989, called his mentor’s discovery “astounding.” He said the finding amazed him “partly because one knew so little about how small molecules bound to DNA in a quite specific manner, and also because of the biological relevance of the discovery.”"
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