Libraries, Local and Gutenberg

There are certain moments in science of remarkable insight that are wonders of human accomplishment. The remarkable insights include the heliocentrism of our planetary system by Copernicus in the 16th century, Darwin’s evolution by natural selection in the 19th century, Watson and Crick’s unravelling of the structure of DNA in the 20th, and Doudna and Charpentier’s CRSPR gene-editing in the 21st. There are more examples of course, but this list alone is so impressive that we should take a moment every now and then to pat “ourselves” on the back. We should certainly want to read about how these insights came to be. I am drawn to that, and, in some cases, needing to find original, cited resources, locally and/or on-line. I recently read Alison Bashford’s “The Huxleys: An Intimate Histor…