A Guinea Pig's History of Biology

This is not really, of course, a Guinea Pig's History, although Guinea Pigs do figure prominently in one long chapter. This is a book about discovery, and the roles that certain plants, animals, insects, and bacteria played in that discovery. Most of these creatures (we'll use the term very loosely here) would be regarded as useless by most people in society--no great loss if they disappeared off the face of the earth. But for different reasons, each had a vital role to play, and this may make you stop and pause before we readily consign another species to extinction. Take, for example, the lowly mouse-ear cress: no obvious benefit to anyone, not harmful so that one wants to eradicate it. Perhaps "the most forgettable plant I've ever met" in Reader's Digest. But as the book notes, scientists may be able to use it to feed the hungry and combat global warming: who would have thunk it? Fruitflies were long considered a minor annoyance--at least they didn't bite humans. But they have been vital in genetic research. The same with Guinea pigs: they are docile because the ancient Incas bred them to be docile--catching them and eating them was easier. Guinea pigs are one of the very few species, along with humans, that cannot synthesize vitamin C, for example. So this book presents us with heroes: the biological heroes, and the humans who recognized their potential to advance the frontiers of knowledge. Endersby has a wonderful writing style: he combines an ease with prose with a fine sense of humor, and you never get bogged down in endless dry technical details. A thoroughly enjoyable book!

Jim Endersby introduces the reader to 12 different organisms in this fascinating book: Equus quagga, Passiflora gracilis, Homo sapiens, Hieracium auricula, Oenothera lamarckiana, Drosophila melanogaster, Cavia porcellus, Bacteriophage, Zea mays, Arabidopsis thaliana, Danio rerio and OncoMouse®.* Some of these characters may be familiar to you, some not, but Endersby uses each of them to introduce the reader to scientists seeking to understand the secret of life. Consider Equus quagga: "The right honourable George Douglas, FRS, 16th Earl of Morton, was perplexed; in 1820, he had sold a chestnut-brown mare to his friend, Sir Gore Ouseley, who had crossed her with 'a very fine black Arabian horse'. Both Morton and Ouseley were astonished by the offspring of this union, two foals who were clearly Arabian horses, but 'both in their colour, and in the hair of their manes, they have a striking resemblance to the quagga'. "Quaggas were a kind of zebra, but it was mainly their heads and shoulders that were striped. They belong to a small, sad club (whose members include the passenger pigeon and the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger) of animals for whom we know the exact day on which they became extinct. The last quagga died in Amsterdam zoo on 12 August 1883. At the time, the species went unmourned, as no one realized she was the last one. Why should the offspring of Ouseley's animals look like quaggas, when both parents were horses?" Morton had a theory. Darwin considered the answer significant for his theory of evolution. Endersby writes: "This book is about how some of these mysteries were unravelled. Long before Darwin, most people knew that for most organisms, as for humans, both males and females were needed to produce offspring, but even after centuries of investigation and speculation, no one knew exactly why, nor exactly what each contributed to their progeny. Given that some creatures managed without sex, what was its purpose? And what about inheritance? Why do most children look like their parents, while some are more like one of their grandparents? How are the characteristics of animal or plant breeds passed on and preserved over generations? And, given that creatures only ever give birth to creatures of the same species, where do new types of organisms come from? Given that species remain largely constant over generations, how and why do they sometimes vary?" Endersby describes how scientists with the aid of these 12 subjects found some of the answers. Scientists began studying guinea pigs around 1780 and they shed light on scurvy, vaccines and vitamins, and shed light on inbreeding. In 1845 Robert Peel abolished the tax on glass, James Hartley invented a system for making rolled plate glass, large greenhouses prolifiated in England, including Darwin's where he studied the crinkled passionflower. The plant gave Darwin clues to his theory, and the reader enjoys Endersby's meandering that describes how it all came about. Cheap glass led to

This is a wonderful book. The author writes with the flair of a good novelist, weaving all kinds of fascinating details into highly entertaining, lucidly told stories centered around some of the creatures that have served as subjects of biological research. The subject matter is certainly interesting, but the author's talent as a writer makes the book a pleasure to read. Who would think that a serious history of the discoveries and controversies related to biological inheritance could be a pleasure to read? Yet this one certainly is. An altogether superb achievement.

Two quick notes: first, though there is a cute photo of a guinea pig on the cover and a few drawings, this is NOT a kids' book. Second, though it is a "popular" science book written for a lay audience, it assumes the audience has some education in biology, enough to recognize the names of, for instance, Francis Galton or JBS Haldane and to know what they were famous for. If you haven't read anything on or thought about biology since you were in high school a few decades ago, you would want to start with something a little less detailed before digging into this. Endersby is English, and so this history is slightly Anglocentric, but nonetheless good. Basically, it's the story of how the mating of a USDA colony of guinea pigs with a bunch of wild Russian fruit flies led to modern molecular biology. No, really, it's sort of an era-by-era look at biology by looking at what plants and animals were being studied, when. We start with the quagga, which went extinct in 1883, in a chapter titled "Equus quagga and Lord Morton's mare" and go on through a plant in Darwin's greenhouse, homo sapiens as Francis Galton's research animal, Mendel's work on the pale hawkweed; Hugo de Vries and some flower; then, "Drosophila melanogaster: Bananas, bottles and Bolsheviks" which ties back to Galton. Finally, we get to chapter 7, "Cavia porcellus: mathematical guinea pigs." We get a history of the domestication of the cavy, and of the naming of it, and then of Abraham Lincoln's establishment of the USDA in 1862, and within only a few decades, the USDA had a large colony of guinea pigs at its experimental farm in Maryland - which I happen to know where that was; we drive past the current Dept. of Agriculture site along Rt. 29 regularly, and every time I see its enormous front lawn now, I envision piggies browsing there. Sewall Wright, who had started working on guinea pigs accidentally as a grad student at Harvard, kept in touch with JBS Haldane from about 1915 on. Haldane and his sister had had a huge bunch of guinea pigs as children: "...his sister Naomi (who would later become a celebrated novelist under her married name, Naomi Mitchison) developed an allergy to the horses she had loved and took up keeping guinea pigs instead. She loved the animals and knew many of them by name; she could impersonate their squeaks and grunts so well that they would answer her. When her elder brother came home from Eton for the school holidays and discovered her new pets, he 'suggested that we should try out what was then called Mendelism on them.' She agreed, deciding that 'Mendelism seemed quite within my intellectual grasp,' and so her pet population began to expand. ... One of JBS's friends remembered that in 1908 the lawn of the Haldanes' house was entirely free from the usual upper-class clutter of croquet hoops and tennis nets; instead, behind wire fencing, were 300 guinea pigs." Anyway, Haldane's work interested Wright, and Wright went to work for the USDA. And therein lies t

In "A Guinea Pig's History of Biology" Jim Endersby has produced a novel and fascinating recounting of the history of biology, from the early scientific explorers to the modern laboratory utilizing the individual histories of laboratory organisms. Numerous examples from Darwin's passion vines to genetically engineered mice are discussed in detail, including much background data (as for example why Guinea pigs are called Guinea pigs). The use of animals and plants as "standard organisms" has produced much controversy (including attacks from animal rights advocates and other scientists), as well as much useful data. As it turns out some plants (like Arabidopsis) viruses (like the bacteriophage) and animals (like the Guinea pig, zebra fish and fruit fly) have characteristics that allow easy rearing and manipulation in the laboratory. These can be used in controlled experiments to answer both basic and applied questions, but this is not to the liking of everybody (agriculturists hated the use of the easily manipulated Arabidopsis because it is not a crop plant, and often influenced the availability of research funds.) On the other hand some economically important organisms that were not so easily studied in the laboratory, such as corn, did offer some rewards for patient researchers (Barbara McClintock won the Nobel Prize for her "jumping genes" research in this difficult plant.) In my opinion Jim Endersby has produced nearly a perfect book for teaching biological principles and the often ragged path to gaining scientific knowledge from nature, as well as the ethical problems involved in such activities as patenting genetically engineered life forms or experimenting on higher animals. The public will only understand science when they understand how scientific ideas are promulgated- that is, the history behind the ideas. Endersby has contributed greatly to the effort in this book, which should be read by anyone wanting to understand how real science is done. This is certainly one of the most innovative of modern books on biological science that I have encountered and I recommend it without reservation.