Bass's admittedly worshipful respect for science, along with his quest to understand it more fully, has prompted him over the past several years to conduct personal interviews with men and women who, given their research achievements, have played major roles in shaping the international science community of today. His book presents 11 of these interviews, touching on subjects as diverse as molecular biology, genetics, chaos theory, and drug research. Among Bass's interviewees are behavioral biologist Sarah Hrdy, neuroscientist Bert Sakmann, archaeologist Farouk El-Baz, and RU 486 developer Etienne-Emile Baulieu.
Of all Bass's subjects, none, perhaps, has achieved more renown than Luc Montagnier, the French biochemist who laid claim in 1983 to discovering the AIDS virus at his Institut Pasteur laboratory in Paris--a claim that was also subsequently made by United States researcher Robert Gallo, head of the National Cancer Institute's laboratory of tumor cell biology in Bethesda, Md. Acrominious debate ...
