"Never destroy what you cannot create" was one of Leo Szliard's codes of conduct. Books about unsung heros' of the scientific age are almost like novels. Nevertheless, great men seem to rise above dry biography if they had some esoteric ways. We have all read stacks of magazines and books about Albert Einstein to probe into all the details of what made him tick (in relative time, of course). Leo Szliard was a mental gypsy from the old world who saw the new world before most of the other "famous" thinkers of the 20th Century even opened their eyes. A must read for a knowledge foundation in enjoying the lifestyles of the Wise and Unusual.

Anyone interested in Szilard, early 20th Century World History, the A-Bomb, or all of the above will find this book hard to put down. This biography is comprehensive, well-researched and properly kind to its subject. Dr. Szilard probably will never get enough credit for his genius and all his great ideas and achievements, but this book does him justice. He seems to come alive in this book, always several steps ahead of everyone else.

American culture's emphasis on individualism often ignores the more collaborative contributions such as Dr. Szilard's. An original, he both created and collaborated, and this book tells his story.

At times, I thought the author might have been over-stating some of Dr. Szilard's accompishments, but the story is otherwise well-done, and frankly, Dr. Szilard deserves a little promotion, so I didn't mind.

I seem to recall having written the anonymous critique below ["Life and loves of the man who patented atomic energy "] when Amazon.com did not yet have its current database system in operation (or is it simply deja vu?). Exactly the high points of Szilard's life in GENIUS IN THE SHADOWS mentioned below still stand out in my mind. Be that as it may, the contributions by such diverse authors as William Lanouette, Leo Szilard's electrical engineer brother Bela Silard [sic], and polio vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk make for an eclectically exciting book.

I recall as a teenager in New York City viewing an historic television debate between Dr. Szilard and his erstwhile student, humble assistant, and that day self-appointed "father" of the hydrogen bomb: Edward Teller. Both my parents had arrived in the United States during the late 1920s from Hungary; they were Szilard's vintage and had crossed paths with him in Budapest. The two powerful Hungarian atomic physicists, Szilard and Teller debated the nuclear arms race on TV (Szilard was fiercely against it). My family was glued to the TV screen. The Soviet Union was menacing us in New York City with THEIR nuclear weapons. Dying of leukemia, Leo Szilard had dragged himself out of his sickbed at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research to debate Teller on this vital subject.

At one point, the condescendingly charming Teller prefaced his offensive remarks with, "But my DEAR Szilard, ..." Leo cut him off in mid sentence with, "I am NOT your 'dear Szilard' anymore ..." It was wonderful! Szilard at his worst was far, far superior to Teller at his best. Alas, Leo Szilard would soon die, and Teller would go on to dazzle his California actor-governor-president friend Ronald Reagan with Star War fantasies for furthering his beloved arms race. By contrast, as GENIUS IN THE SHADOWS reveals, Szilard not only possessed incredible insight and creativity in science and geopolitics, but he also expressed a great moral sense and love of humanity.

GENIUS IN THE SHADOWS treats one of the 20th century's most significant thinkers and humanitarians with down to earth candor not often found in biographies. Those wishing to be entertained by sharing the exciting adventures in the life of Leo Szilard, read this book.

The section dealing with population dynamics in a closed system articulates, in a manner that cannot be denied, the fundamental nature of much which we see around us in our current world.

Read it, if you dare, and contemplate the misery of subordinated hordes of people on the planet. Investigate the ramifications to populations of bacteria in a petri dish, when they reach the perimeter of the dish; and reflect on the aberrant behavior of rodents in overpopulated cages.

Guaranteed to make you think......

Jonas Salk is best known as the discoverer of the polio vaccine. He was also a great and visionary thinker and this book probably best exemplifies that side of him. His basic thesis is based on the need to educate the population. He suggests that knowledge will not only advance us in the evolutionary sense it will prevent us from destroying ourselves. This is essential reading and I am sorry to see it out of print. Get it if you can.

Without getting too technical, Ervin Laszlo explains one of the most essential sciences of today: general evolutionary theory. This is not the evolution of Darwin, mind you. It is the evolution of ALL things, from matter to life to societies to the cosmos itself. A good starter book.

I give this book a high rating because of its influence in the field. It is the first case study of laboratory science ever published, and is often quoted in anthropology, sociology, and philosophy of science. The book's conclusion is social constructivist in nature, to a very extreme degree. Scientific facts are not discovered, they are constructed through social processes. The actual study was done by Latour, a French philosopher, and the method was to assume strangeness. That is, Latour pretended he didn't know anything about what the scientists were doing and tried to make up (construct) an account. The usual problems with relativism plague Latour and Woolgar's brand of social constructivism, most notably issues with reflexivity. If scientific accounts are constructed and do not have to do with the phenomena, why should we think that Laboratory Life tells us anything about the phenomena of laboratory science? Their answer is that we shouldn't. The only question in evaluating texts is, "are you convinced?" If not, fine. Come up with a better (more persuasive) account. People who think that science, philosophy, and academe in general should have something to do with the real world will be horribly frustrated by this conclusion. But everyone should be frustrated by the fact that the conclusion just doesn't follow from the data Latour gathered. It seems to come entirely from prior convictions of the authors. I recommend reading the book, however, because of its popularity and because it is a fantastic exemplar of a bad relativist and constructivist argument. Get the revised edition, which has a postscript and extra references. For a chuckle, look up some of the reviews (cited in the 2nd ed. references) from scientific journals. They are mostly cheerful recognitions of the book's subject matter (laboratory science) without any reference to--or argument with--the strong anti-realist claims. It makes you wonder if these people acctually read the book.

Latour's book "Science in Action" is more trendy... but I suggest you read this earlier book instead. It's clear and makes its points in a compelling fashion.

It seems to me that the previous reviewer is either a wooly-head theoretician or that the previous reviewer hasn't actually done any research in a laboratory. Because in this book, there are many sparkling insights into the way that science is practised.

It takes a while for Latour to get going as he is quite verbose in the early section, where he discusses his "anthropological" approach to science studies. However, after that, he makes a couple of points that as far as I know, he was the first philosopher of science to make.

First, Latour demonstrates the intimate relationship between the publication of scientific papers, scientific prestige, laboratory finances and actual experiments. He makes the seemingly obvious, though not so when the book came out, that the possibility of experiments in a lab requires the influx of an amazing out of money. The acquisition of this research money takes up a large proportion of the time of the head honcho scientist in a laboratory .

Second, Latour shows that entities in science are always defined by a network of properties that are experimentally determined. Scientific entities are hardly ever seen as objects with a few simple analytical properties. In fact, the more properties the better. And it doesn't matter if the mesh of properties is convoluted and seemingly contradictory. For each property concerned, there must be a vast array of material techniques to measure, control and manipulate that property. A new entity in science is accepted as real only when there are enough inter-locking properties to guarantee its existence. No method, by itself, is ever convincing.

Latour points out that once an object is deemed to be real, scientists often invert the logic and argue that the reason why the combined set of experiments worked in the first place was that the object was in fact real. Whether this inversion of logic stands up to philosophical scrutiny - I do not know - but I have seen many practising scientists make this jump in logic. I've even used it myself. It is here that the "realist" and "anti-realist" debate rages. However, I think Latour reports it just as he sees it.

Third, Latour carries out an analysis of scientific texts, which I have yet to see anywhere else. Scientific statments take on 5 modalities - from speculative hypothesis to proven statements to unspoken assumption. Latour gives a account of how the modalities of each statement are modified by how every other scientist in the field cites the statement in future scientific papers. They can ignore it, attack it as a useless hypothesis, bolster it by citing it as a supporting statement, adulate it by assuming that is a proven statement, and finally they just assume it's true. This scrutiny occurs continuously both inside the lab and in conferences.

However, the difference between this process in the sciences as opposed to the humanities, is that these statements are often associated with machines that act in the material world. Proving a statement means that a material effect is generated.

Using this method, Latour can analyse the fortunes of the scientists in a lab. And analysing the citations of scientific papers results in a reasonably good definition of scientific credibility. As a grad student in a biophysics lab, I've seen this happen - albeit on an intuitive level.

Although Latour has since gone onto to more and more abstract studies, the beauty of Laboratory Life is that it is firmly grounded in the actual practises of an existing laboratory, the Guillemen Lab at the Salks Institute.

The author doesn't really discuss the topic as "advertised" by his book's title & its subtitle. I expected a discussion on the human mechanism to create its own personal reality based on a person's perceptions of the external world. Instead he writes about evolution particularly that of the biosphere -- which is a nice discussion. He "dances" around merging intuition & reason, I guess because he has very foggy notions on how to do it. So he just dangles the topic in front of his readers. I concur wholeheartedly with Salk that morals & ethics is strictly & purely a human creation, that they have no basis in supernatural "things" or mental creations. It's just us humans down here, trying to live from day to day hopefully with some measure of meaningfulness. At least the book is very short. If Salk's book were a long one, I'm sure it would have been unbearably tedious & pedantic. But if one's never thought about the power of evolution & asked why or how come there's living things on this planet, this book would trigger some good thinking.