A Monk and Two Peas by Robin Marantz Henig, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £14.99, ISBN 0297643657 (The Monk in the Garden in the US)
RADICAL ideas sometimes need champions to survive the hurly-burly of science. Darwin had his bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley, to defend the theory of evolution. And Gregor Mendel had biologist William Bateson to fight his corner.
Of all the advances made in biology in the past century, nothing has had more impact on our lives than genetics. Mendel’s work was rediscovered in 1900, the structure of DNA was revealed about 50 years later, and as the century came to…
