This is a cool little book. About 150 pages, and a size the feels good in the hand (about 7.5" X 10'), I think this is how science should be introduced. In the context of history and biography, science is about people. Anyone who has sat through as many science classes as I have knows that at times, science is exciting (blow up stuff in a test tube!) and at times, excruciatingly boring (if you add a benz to that molecule, what shape will it become and what organic compound will it now be?) And yet, my kids, and yours, have a lot of science to come in their next 12-20 years of schooling. (Husb. and I slogged through 45 years combined..) So, how to get them interested and invested?
Gregor Mendel is no Robert Pattison, he wasn't Hollywood Handsome(he looked like Garrison Keillor) and he wasn't glamorous (he grew thousands of peas and was a friar!) but he was interesting, and simply methodical. What he conceived and figured out, through persistence and mathematical evaluation put us on the scientific road that leads us today into gene mapping, cures for disease through genetic manipulation and cows that can produce on average 23 gallons of milk a day. 23 GALLONS. Unfortunately there were some majorly bad turns in the road( like Eugenics which gave Nazi Germany a scientific basis for the holocaust). Reading this book will give a face not just to Mendel, but Sturtevant(DNA mapping), Watson and Crick (the crazy boys of double helix fame) and Punnett (a real square). And perhaps when they sit in their first genetics class and the teacher begins to introduce deoxyribonucleic acid, they'll think- "Yeah, yeah, when is lab? I want to try using restriction enzymes to cut up DNA, then using electrophoresis, separate out the fragments, then switch my fragment with a copy from a bacterial plasmid using a ligase enzyme! That would be so cool. I could then grow my gene on a culture. Cloning dude. Cloning..."
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