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(More customer reviews)You know about writer's block, the frightening state of an author who just cannot come up with another idea about which to write. Nicholas Harberd had researcher's block. He had done plenty of work as a laboratory scientist, working out the biochemical mechanisms of some very basic capabilities of growth in plants. Having gotten some answers, there turned out to be more and deeper questions (the familiar pattern that will keep science going forever), but he was not inspired into a next project. What to do? Part of the charm of his book, _Seed to Seed: The Secret Life of Plants_ (Bloomsbury) is that he lets us know how he as a working scientist came to solve that problem. He lets us in on some biological secrets, as he opens up some of the mechanisms that are at the core of what roots and shoots do. Best of all, he gives himself, and imparts to us, a higher appreciation for the natural world, invoking a mystic unity inspired by science, and an appreciation for all the paradoxes that this entails.
The specific subject of Harberd's research and his book is _Arabidopsis thaliana_, the thale-cress, a humble weed which has gained stardom as the first plant to have its DNA entirely sequenced. To dismantle the block that has left him uninspired to start up any new project, Harberd started a journal for 2004 to record the history of one thale-cress plant; this book is his journal. His selected plant isn't one of the thousands of plants in his lab, but one in the wild, for which he (and the reader) come to have interest and affection. In watching the plant, he describes for himself and for us the intricate dance between DNA, RNA, and the proteins for which they code. By experimentation, and there is a good deal described in these pages, the exquisitely fine-tuned molecular symphony takes place; even in the humble root of this humble plant there are regulators, and regulators to regulate the regulators, and so on in dizzying iterations.
It is fair to ask what use all this detailed knowledge is. Even his daughter, when being told about proteins that restrain the growth of plants, wants Harberd to use them on a neighbor's sycamore that increasingly is shading their garden. The real goal, Harberd says, is not utility (although it is certainly possible that plants are going to be improved the better we know the details of their molecular workings). And for him, the real goal is also not simply a better understanding of how the molecules do their jobs. "I'm more motivated by the sense that understanding brings me closer to Nature. That there's a link between understanding and reverence." It is a pleasure to read Harberd's musings on how nature may be perceived as a unity in different ways, how his plant is so connected with the air and soil around it that distinctions between those entities seem artificial, or how, if one considers the sun as the nucleus of a globe defined by the spread of its light, then the plants which respond to the light, their germinated seeds, and those of us who live on plants, are all parts of the sun. Harberd has done a wonderful job of telling what a scientist goes through, how decisions get made about what sort of work should be done next, and even about the difficulties of getting published. These are not reflections strictly confined to plant biology, and while _Seed to Seed_ has within it a great deal of explanation about molecular complexity, it is best in its vivid musings on how science can reflect nature and bring us closer to it.
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