Life Sciences for the 21st Century. Ehud Keinan, Israel Schechter, and Michael Sela, eds. Weinheim, Germany: Wiley-VCH, 2003, 355 pp., $45.00, hardcover. ISBN 3-527-30588-2.

A companion volume to Chemistry for the 21st Century , this book opens with a discussion of how the branches of science arose as schisms within European universities. Today, however, academic institutions promote the integration of scientific disciplines and related research. In this volume, the authors seek to present a sampling of scientific domains within biology, with the aim of exposing readers to new ideas and topics “well beyond their own scientific disciplines”. The 16 chapters range from detailed descriptions of biochemical mechanisms to philosophical discussions of the application of scientific methods to agriculture and ecology. Chapter 1, for example, covers the functioning of ribosomes to make proteins. As a student of the mechanism of translation, I was amazed at how much has been learned in the past decade. The whole ribosome has been crystallized to show its tertiary structure with 2.4-A resolution. The smaller subunit, 30S in prokaryotes, has been found to be more flexible but less stable than the larger, 50S, …