Quite a few of the golden boys of the Science Book Prize have been biologists
named Steve. There will be no triumphant Stevens/Stephens this year—a big
surprise, because Steve Jones’s brilliant Almost Like A Whale (
Darwin’s Ghost in the US) looked like a shoo-in for the shortlist, and a
good bet for the prize. Biology does dominate the shortlist for the 1999 Aventis
award: three out of six on the list deal with evolution and genetics, and a
fourth is on medical history. John Naughton’s A Brief History of the
Future and Brian Greene’s untangling of string theory, The…
Prize reads
20 May 2000
