Frontiers 2001-2002: Science and Technology Book

People who haven't bought a science book all year will surely buy Frontiers 01--the first in what's hoped will be an annual series of science and technology digests. The book's "unique selling points" are admittedly few. A yearbook's whole purpose is to reflect the generally accepted canon. It's supposedto be (to use the Sixties perjorative) "establishment". But what keeps us reading Frontiers 01 is not simply its generous range (this in itself would not be enough--who hasn't at some time lost patience with the miscellaneous spew of New Scientist?), but willingness of its authors to take a deep breath, start from first principles, and bring us up to speed on the year with a minimum of gosh-wow rhetoric. There are newsy articles (many by Radford himself). There are features tied less to advances during the year than occasioned by the editor's recognition of a discipline's heightened profile ('Why an article about the science of dendrochronology in 2001?' worries contributor Mike Baillie: but Radford's too canny an editor to rely purely on Big Events). There is even what is effectively a digest of an important book-length work--Martin Rees's valiant though dizzying summation of his recently published Our Cosmic Habitat. Tim Hubbard's essay on (among other things) the protein-folding problem conveys the sheer scale of work still to be done on understanding and harnessing the human (or, indeed, any) genome. Mike Stratton's piece on cancer research is equally dizzying. There's real excitement in these contributions. What a pity the scientific culture as a whole has not been better served. The readers of this yearbook will be readers, at least occasionally, of other works of popular science. Scientists themselves rely on the pop-science shelves to understand other people's disciplines. But where in print or in broadcast--indeed, where but here on this Web site?--is there any real wide-ranging discussion of these works? If ever a branch of literature were in need of a culture of criticism, it is this one. Next year's Frontiers 01could well do with a review of the literature.--Simon IngsRead More