Egg and Sperm Race

"Where does life come from? What do a mother and father really contribute to a child? Does like always breed like? For thousands of years, there were no clear answers to these questions, and people believed all sorts of strange things - snakes and mice were thought to appear from dirt, barnacle geese were believed to come from barnacles, and it was widely assumed that women gave birth to cats and rabbits. In this world there was no space for the idea of 'reproduction' - there appearded to be no rules underlying the generation of life. But all this confusion was swept away by a wave of discovery in the mid-seventeenth century, made by a small group of European scientists who used experiments and the newly discovered microscope to study the mystery of life. In just one decade they showed that like bred like, that all animals - including humans - come from an egg, that there is no such thing as spontaneous generation, and that there are millions of tiny wriggling 'eels' in semen. At last the building blocks for understanding how reproduction occurs were in place. But in one of the great ironies of science, it would be another 150 years before the full meaning of their findings became clear. Focusing on the very human stories underlying this decade of fertility, 'The egg & sperm race' describes these discoveries in clear and accessible terms, highlighting the rivalries and friendships of the men who carried out this work and showing the links between science and culture in the tumultuous years of the 1660s and 1670s. Endlessly fascinating and written with wry and engaging humour, it also shows the many detours, side-roads and dead ends that lie along the path to knowledge." -- book jacket.