Can fiction and scientific autobiography coexist?
By Jennifer Rohn
ARTICLE EXTRAS
The biologist Lynn Margulis has led an eventful life: fighting for decades to push the endosymbiotic theory of organelle development into biology textbooks, sharing a brief marriage with cosmologist Carl Sagan, championing the Gaia theory, and in recent years, criticizing Neo-Darwinism and aspects of conventional science. Luminous Fish, self-published by Margulis' own imprint, attempts a curious symbiosis of fiction and memoir, but never quite achieves that feeling of mutualism.
The book launches with an exposition about the flashlight fish, itself a symbiosis between a teleost and specialized luminous bacteria. Instead of letting the metaphor speak for itself, the author takes great pains to explain that her goal is to shed light on the human side of scientific discovery in intermittent flashes. In a world so bereft of good "lab lit" - novels featuring realistic scientists plying their trade - ...
