Table of Contents

Introduction Part One: What Cells Are and How They Work Chapter 1 -- A Day the World Changed Chapter 2 -- A Guided Tour of the Cell Part Two: The Genetic Code -- How It Works, What It Means, and How Humans Cracked It Chapter 3 -- The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology Chapter 4 -- Solving the Mystery of Life: the Road to the Double Helix Chapter 5 -- Epigenetics: Beyond the Central Dogma Chapter 6 -- The Monk's Garden: Mendel's Law of Independent Assortment and How It Can Be Broken Chapter 7 -- The Revolutionary Reaction, or, How to Make DNA in Your Kitchen Chapter 8 -- Piecing Together the Puzzle: How We Sequence DNA Chapter 9 -- The Genome and Personalized Medicine: Progress, Promise, and Potential Problems Chapter 10 -- The Science, Technology, and Ethics of Manipulating the Genome Chapter 11 -- Science Fiction and Social Fiction: What Is and Is Not in Our Genes Part Three: The Amazing Technology of Seeing Impossibly Small Things Chapter 12 -- The Jellyfish That Taught Us How to See Chapter 13 -- How We See Clearly Inside Living Cells Chapter 14 -- Light-sheet Microscopy, or, The Light in SPIM Stays Mainly in the Plane Chapter 15 -- Super-resolution Microscopy: Turning the Lights On One at a Time Chapter 16 -- What Makes the Glowworm Glow? The Advantages of Luminescent Imaging Chapter 17 -- More Ways to Take Pretty and Enlightening Pictures Part Four: Matters of Life and Death Chapter 18 -- How Cells Die Chapter 19 -- The Mystery of HIV Part Five: Cells, Organs and Organ Systems Chapter 20 -- What Is an Organ and Why Do We Have Them? Chapter 21 -- The Kidney: Cells in Concert Chapter 22 -- The Brain: How It Works, How We Learn, and Why It's Hard to Study Chapter 23 -- The Immune System: How It Defends Us and Sometimes Attacks Us Part Six: The Profession of Cell Biology -- the Good, the Bad, and the Future Chapter 24 -- "Judah Is Going to Cure Cancer in Two Years" Chapter 25 -- Ethics, Ambition, and the Greatest Discovery That Wasn't Chapter 26 -- The Nano Revolution Chapter 27 -- Money, Power, Ambition, and the Pursuit of Knowledge: Thoughts on the Current State of Science References and Further reading Acknowledgements About the author

About the Author

Dr. Joshua Z. Rappoport received a bachelor's degree in Biology from Brown University and then went on to earn a Ph.D. from the Program in Mechanisms of Disease and Therapeutics at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine Graduate School of Biological Sciences of New York University. Following defense of his thesis Dr. Rappoport went on to perform postdoctoral work at The Rockefeller University in New York City in the Laboratory of Cellular Biophysics. Subsequently he was recruited as a tenured faculty member in the School of Biosciences at the University of Birmingham in England.

In 2014 Dr. Rappoport has returned to the United States where he is currently the Director of the Center for Advanced Microscopy and Nikon Imaging Center at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and a faculty member in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology. Dr. Rappoport's scientific perspective aims to develop and apply cutting edge microscopy to address fundamental questions in cell biology.

Dr. Rappoport lives in Chicago with his wife Ema, a neuroscientist, and their dog Kris.

Reviews

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""Beautifully written, inspiring philosophical prose presenting a delightful muse on the microscopic world that matters more than we ever before imagined.""

—Spencer Shorte, PhD, group leader and director of the Imagopole resource at the Institut Pasteur in Paris

""A bird's-eye view of the amazing edifice upon which life was built, the cell. Joshua Z. Rappoport gives a brilliant account of how it works, how humans discovered it, and the consequences for life on earth.""

—Steve Busby, FRS, University of Birmingham UK

""Nicely conveys the historical background behind classical benchmarks in cell biology, and the excitement of recent advances in visualizing the inner workings of our cells.""

—Mark Pallen, MD, PhD, author of The Rough Guide to Evolution and professor of Microbial Genomics at Warwick Medical School
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