Natural Obsessions: The Search for the Oncogene

If you are going to study biology in graduate school, this book will have you more prepared to face all the difficulties and frustrations you are going to meet. I wish I had read it at the beginning of my graduate study.

I really enjoyed this book. It helped me understand a little bit about what it is like to be a basic research scientist and how some of the important early discoveries in cancer biology came about. Angier gives a very honest and open look at the politics inside labs and between labs as well as at the key players involved (primarily Bob Weinberg). Angier does an incredible job explaining the science, too.

In my senior year of college, we were assigned Natural Obsessions for the relevance to oncology as a science. I had expected, as with all other undergraduate literature, to find only academic value in the book and approached it as such. But what unfolded instead was a journey through the strange and passionate world of research. It is what made me want to become an oncologist.The nature of the story is of the many races during the 1980s to identify the genes causative of cancer. The narrative largely follows one lab, that of Robert Weinberg at MIT, and details their many setbacks and their even more groundbreaking victories. The author takes an active part, effectively becoming absorbed into the research and drawing the readers with her.What the book offers, then, is a daily tread through the lives of basic researchers: not filled with sterile labs and stuffy professors, but with the drama, intrigue, and bittersweet triumphs normally found only in fiction. As there are no outright heroes or villains (except perhaps cancer itself), the moral ambiguity of each of the subplots makes the struggles more human. There is as much backstabbing, cut-throat competitiveness, and outright selfishness in the research world shown here as in any other professional field. But there is also collaboration, celebration, and respect. Anyone who thinks basic science is boring should be convinced otherwise.The other side of the story is, indeed, academic in nature, though interwoven seamlessly with the stories. Despite the heavy scientific concepts throughout the book, Natalie Angier -- a non-scientistist herself -- has taken great pains to evince the most convoluted theories in a light, colorful language. Not all of it will be clear immediately, but the essence of the book doesn't require total familiarity with the technicalities. It is the humanity of the researchers that drives this book, not the research itself.For undergraduates unsure of thier career choices, I can recommend no better book than Natural Obsessions for deciding if scientific research is for them. For some, like one of my friends who chose med school over grad school, the themes of competitiveness and failure can be disheartening. For others, like myself, it can open up a new perspective on science, one that can be exciting as well as rewarding if you have a passion for it.

This book covers all the in-depth information a person could want to know about cancer, while at the same time not burying the reading in technical jargon and biological confusion. I enjoyed reading this book for the information presented, but also the method in which it was conveyed. A must buy for anyone interested in this terrible disease.

Ms. Angier has responded brilliantly to the criticism of Mike Wigler (one of the scientists featured in the book) and refrained from writing "a textbook". She has instead taken us into the world of hardcore biomedical research to see the people behind the scenes as they race to unlock the secrets of nature. Focusing on the events and people in the Weinberg lab at MIT during the early days of the discovery of cellular oncogenes, the book leads us to share with them the excitement of discovery as well as the pain of defeat, for mother nature is often a rather cagey opponent. This book is an invaluable tool to budding biomedical scientists in appreciating the lives and work of their predecessors, and I highly recommend it to anyone who's ever been bored by their biology textbooks.