Just published by University of Chicago Press is A Century of Nature: Twenty-One Discoveries that Changed Science and the World. The book contains seminal Nature papers published over the last 100 years, each of which is accompanied by commentary from a leading scientist in the field.
Included in the book are the 1953 paper in which James Watson and Francis Crick reported the structure of DNA and 1980 paper in which Christiane Nusslein-Volhard and Eric Wieschaus report homeotic mutations in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster.
Some of the book's content has been made available online for free.
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Births
1625 - Giovanni Domenico Cassini, Italian scientist
From the September 15, 2006 AWIS Washington Wire
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My undergrad encounters
Books from Nobel laureates in molecular biology have a tradition of being surprising.