Sacred literature

When I was a kid, my brother-in-law the chemist would often refer to "The Literature." He gave the phrase a reverent emphasis that at first I attributed to his British upbringing. He was disinterested in the mundane, lower case literature that most people associate with the word. He only read books of facts and hadn't read a novel since high school. I now know that when you mention The Literature to a scientist, or any academic, it means journals and books they absorb while drinking coffee or sitting on the toilet. Normal people cherish real literature that is read and reread, bought in hardback after first reading in paperback. Scientists have The Literature that is never reshelved because it is always being used. For each of us, there is the bible of our brand of biology or physics or chemistry. You might expect these to be well-known theoretical works such as Darwin's On the Origin of Species, but they are usually textbooks used for introductory courses, or reference books used in the lab.

In my undergraduate years, the bible of biochemistry was the textbook by Albert L. Lehninger called Biochemistry, then in its 2nd edition, succeeded by the title Principles of Biochemistry, now in its 6th. The most recent editions are no longer actually written by Lehninger, who died in 1986. Such is the power of his name that it is now incorporated into the title. Lehninger was an unusual textbook because you could actually read it; the man wrote good prose. Having had a childhood interest in real literature with a touch of dyslexia with peoples' names, when I picked up this textbook, I always thought of the famous short story Leiningen versus the ants. I imagined Albert L. Lehninger chasing giant ants, threatening them with biochemistry, or perhaps crushing them with his book. My own copy of Lehninger followed me faithfully for years, despite its heft, until I finally left it behind on one of my transatlantic moves. Then I bought another copy in a used bookstore for $1.50. It is still in the lab.

One science bible you definitely could not read was The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, now in its 94th edition. Its merit is proportional to its weight, now 8 pounds for all its 2668 pages. Owning a personal copy was a badge of honour for chemistry students. You could use it to look up, for example, the melting point of sodium chloride, or the molecular weight of molybdenum, to seven or eight decimal places. If you had this book full of tables and graphs, you might use it two or three times a year for class assignments and save yourself some trips to the library. A new edition is released every year, but I don't know anyone with two copies. Somewhere in the United States, there must be a house made entirely of copies of the so-called rubber bible. 

The absence of a big biology bible on my shelf is surprising. There are bibles for subfields, but for the broad subject, nothing. I can hardly remember the textbooks we used. They were uniformly tedious, turgidly written with boring grayscale illustrations that captured none of the glory of the living world. Biology always had a reputation for its heavy emphasis on memorization. You had to just know the answer for a test, and couldn't work it out with formulas or logic. Nowadays, with colour digital photography, ebooks and lavishly illustrated websites, the potential exists for a biology bible that is something other than a book. But first biologists need to escape their database rut and find a format that lives and breathes.

Many scientists hope to write their own bible some day. Most of us shuffle along scribbling scientific pamphlets and comic books, or obscure blogs. But the ultimate dream is to produce such a staggering work that our successors continue to update it in perpetuity, including our name as part of the title as they have done for Prof. Lehninger, ensuring our productivity from beyond the grave.