The features of this book are designed to address four key challenges:
1. Students see sciences as a set of facts rather than an active human endeavor.
Moments of Discovery
Scientific breakthroughs represent the exhilarating culmination of a lot of hard work. Each chapter opens with a description of a significant breakthrough in molecular biology, as told by the scientist who made the discovery. The scientists featured in the Moments of Discovery are: Norm Arnheim, Bonnie Bassler, Steve Benner, James Berger, Carlos Bustamante, Jamie Cate, Joe DeRisi, Myron Goodman, Lin He, Tracy Johnson, Melissa Jurica, Judith Kimble, Judith Klinman, Robert Lehman, Tim Lohman, Steve Mayo, Harry Noller, Lorraine Symington, Jack Szostak, Robert Tjian, Jonathan Widom, and Wei Yang.
How We Know
Each chapter ends with a How We Know section that combines fascinating stories of research and researchers with experimental data for students to analyze.
2. Students often view science as a completed story with an oversimplified script.
Unanswered Questions
A short section at the end of each chapter describes important areas still open to discovery, showing students that even well-covered subjects, such as nucleic acid structure and DNA replication, are far from fully explored.
End-of-Chapter Problems
Extensive problem sets at the end of each chapter give students the opportunity to think about and work with the chapter’s key ideas. Each problem set concludes with a Data Analysis Problem, giving students the critical experience of interpreting real research data (many relating to the work described in the “How We Know” section). Solutions to the problems can be found at the back of the book.
3. Students get lost in the details.
Key Conventions
These brief paragraphs clearly lay out for students some fundamental principles often glossed over.
Illustrations
Good figures should speak for themselves.
We have worked to make our figures simple and to keep our figure legends as brief as possible. The illustrations in this text are the product of close collaboration with our colleague Adam Steinberg. Together with the talented artists at Dragonfly, Adam has helped to hone and implement our vision.
4. Students see evolution as an abstract theory.
Highlights
These discussions are designed to enhance student understanding and appreciation of the relevance of each chapter’s material. There are four categories of Highlights:
- Medicine explores diseases that arise from defects in biochemical pathways, and how concepts uncovered in molecular biology have contributed to drug therapies and other treatments.
- Technology focuses on cutting-edge molecular biology methods.
- Evolution reveals the role of molecular biology research in understanding key biological processes and the connections between organisms.
- A Closer Look examines a wide variety of additional, intriguing topics.