Clone love

PD Smith on The Shattered Self: The End of Natural Evolution | Stories of the Invisible: A Guided Tour of Molecules | A Brief History of Science As Seen Through the Development of Scientific Instruments

The Shattered Self: The End of Natural Evolution, by Pierre Baldi (MIT Press, £10.50)

Consider this: a couple decide to clone themselves and bring up their clones as brother and sister. But like their parents, they fall in love - is that incest? After all, genetically they are no more related than their parents. This is not science fiction, but what Baldi pseudishly calls "fiction science", forays into our disturbing scientific future: "Human cloning is not a distant planet, a far horizon, but a very close, unexplored land." Biology and computer science will, says Baldi, revolutionise our sense of self: goodbye to "well-defined, isolated individuals", and hello to a brave new world of clones and "connectivity". Call me old-fashioned, but Baldi's idea of "sitting in a room with 10 clones of yourself" adds a new and terrible dimension to Sartre's definition of hell. Thankfully, scientists make poor soothsayers: 50 years ago, CP Snow predicted that science would end the disparity between rich and poor nations by 2000. PDS

Stories of the Invisible: A Guided Tour of Molecules, by Philip Ball (OUP, £7.99)

"Mollycules," says Sergeant Fottrell in Flann O'Brien's The Dalkey Archive , "are as lively as 20 punky leprechauns doing a jig on the top of a flat tombstone." Ball agrees, describing the molecular basis of life as a "dance". But his popular introduction to chemistry will disappoint aficionados of the explosive and malodorous science recalled by Oliver Sacks in Uncle Tungsten . Modern chemistry is about manipulating the invisible. "Today's sophisticated molecular cookery" ranges from synthesising life-saving drugs like taxol to genetics and the chemical origins of life. The technical language makes for heavy reading at times, but Ball has a nice line in analogies, essential for such an intangible subject: "A cell is a city, teeming with molecular inhabitants." He is at his best describing the "Byzantine complexities" of the body's molecular mechanisms and succeeds in bringing us up to speed with the "fabulously dynamic, interactive world" of molecules. PDS

A Brief History of Science As Seen Through the Development of Scientific Instruments, by Thomas Crump (Robinson, £8.99)

Ernest Rutherford remarked that "all science is either physics or stamp-collecting". It's a view Crump shares, so there's no room for Darwin or even Crick and Watson in his history. Instead he concentrates on astronomy, chemistry and, of course, physics. Crump takes a nuts-and-bolts view: it's not just abstract theories but instruments, like the telescope and the cyclotron, that reveal "new worlds" of natural knowledge. He ranges across 400 years of ground-breaking science, from the Copernican revolution to the historic moment on a squash court at the University of Chicago in 1942, when Enrico Fermi's atomic pile went critical and the nuclear Pandora's Box was opened. Crump's argument that technological innovation is often the engine of scientific progress is important and he provides an enduring sense of the extraordinary ingenuity that defines our relationship with nature. PDS