Conville & Walsh Ltd

Conville & Walsh Ltd
Non-fiction
THE EGG AND SPERM RACE
The Seventeenth-Century Scientists Who Unravelled the
Secrets of Sex, Life and Growth
Matthew Cobb
A fascinating subject, full of arresting material and personalities
– Lisa Jardine, SUNDAY TIMES
Lively… You can almost smell the formaldehyde on the page
– FINANCIAL TIMES
For millennia, humanity has wondered where life comes from. At different times and in different
places, people have discussed what the mother and father each contribute, how the miracle of
conception takes place, and why offspring sometimes look like one parent, sometimes like another
and sometimes like neither. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, this combination of
reproduction, conception and embryonic development was wrapped up in a single term: ‘generation’.
Amazingly, the decisive step in understanding generation, in revealing how sex works and in outlining
the fundamental laws of reproduction came about in the space of ten tumultuous years in the middle
of the seventeenth century. This was when a network of six scientists and physicians – including
names famous in the history of science such as de Graaf, Swammerdam, Redi, Malpighi and
Leeuwenhoek – turned their scalpels and their microscopes, their intuition and their experimental
ingenuity, on what had become the crucial problem of the age. Now, for the first time, THE EGG AND
SPERM RACE tells their story.
Linked by a series of friendships, rivalries and chance encounters, these six men were radically
different in temperament and training: they include a poet keen on vipers, a shop-keeper with an
unhealthy interest in his own sperm, a mystical student obsessed with insects, a bright young doctor
loved by his friends and hated by his rivals, and a future saint who laid the foundations of neurology,
geology and crystallography. Through the insights produced by their various approaches, they
changed the way we understand the living world. Above all, they showed that humans are just like
other animals, subject to the same laws of reproduction and development.
Matthew Cobb is programme director for zoology at the University of Manchester, where he lectures
on animal behaviour. Over the past few years he has also made an intensive study of the life of
Swammerdam, one of the main protagonists in THE EGG AND SPERM RACE. Matthew has thus
become an acknowledged expert on the scientific participants and debates of the seventeenth
century, and has published several articles on the topic for both general readers and historians of
science. He is also a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement.
UK Publisher Simon & Schuster
US Publisher 8 August 2006
UK Publication 3 April 2006
Length 332 pages
Agent PT
All rights available excluding UK & Commonwealth, US, Netherlands (De Bezige Bij)
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