[.ca] I Wish I'D Made You Angry Earlier (ISBN 0879696745)

From Amazon.com:
Max Perutz is an extraordinary scientist. After training in chemistry at the University of Vienna during the 1930s, he went to Cambridge and became fascinated by biochemistry just as that discipline was becoming ripe for conquest by scientific heroes. He knew and worked with many of them: William Bragg, J.D. Bernal, Crick and Watson--and became one himself, through his discovery of the structure of hemoglobin, which led to his Nobel Prize in 1962. Such are the credentials Perutz brings to this wonderful collection of essays, credentials that he uses always to illuminate, never to dominate. In prose that rolls by like countryside seen from the window of a train, Perutz takes the reader traveling through his own life and that of many other leading scientists, giving fresh insights into the workings of first-rate minds. We meet such characters as Leo Szilard, the inventor of the atomic bomb, who devoted his life to preventing its use, and the German chemist Fritz Haber, the very mirror image of Szilard, who became a real-life Faust. We also learn much about Perutz's own approach to science--including his involvement in a project to harness icebergs in the fight against the Nazis. With its combination of subject choice and light, often humorous, style, this is one of the best collections of scientific essays to emerge for years. --Robert Matthews, Amazon.co.uk

Charming prose, plenty of surprises:
Perutz is not only a biochemist and a Nobel Laureate physicist, but a witty and graceful writer to boot, and readers will be in for a treat. But more than the character sketches of great scientific minds like Szilard and Monod, I appreciated two startling stories in particular, one of which is told in more fascinating detail than I'd encountered before, and the other, which is shocking and, if true, deserving of wider publicity. The first story details the work of Nobel prize-winning chemist Fritz Haber, whose synthesis of ammonia enabled Germany to sustain its military effort in WWI. Haber, a gentle man of tremendous culture and erudition, was also ambitious. Perutz describes in more detail than is readily available elsewhere Haber's efforts to sustain chemical warfare experiments after the war under the guise of agricultural research. Tragically, he supervised the development of Zyklon B, a deadly gas that would later be used to exterminate millions of people of Jewish descent, including some of Haber's own relatives. Fortunately for him, Haber died in exile before learning the full extent, and horror, of his folly. More startling to me was the story of Albert Schatz who, Perutz contends, is the real discoverer of streptomycin. Schatz, writes Perutz, "was the son of poor Jewish farmers in Connecticut and had studied soil microbiology to find ways of increasing the yields on his father's unproductive farm. He embarked on the search for antibiotics only because Waksman made it a condition of his meager offer of $40 a month to work in his laboratory; but then Schatz threw himself into the research, testing hundreds of different soil micro-organisms for antibacterial activity." Perutz claims that Schatz displayed all the initiative and effort warranted for a Nobel Prize, and that Waksman did nothing more than sit in his office while the experiments were going on. Later, claims Perutz, Waksman denied Schatz the recognition he so richly deserved. Unless I missed something, I wonder why Perutz is telling us this only now? Wouldn't it have been better for this information to have been revealed when Waksman was alive to defend himself? And can we expect forthcoming reference books to take note and set the record straight?