A Biologist in Paradise: Musings on Nature & Science

by Roger Gosden

This album is a celebration of science and nature by someone who loves them. The author turned to full time writing after a career in reproductive science and became a Master Naturalist in Virginia. He writes about things he knows and cares about in forty essays and memoirs, offering them to readers who share his curiosity and concerns. This is not a science book for scientists nor a nature book for naturalists, although he hopes both parties will read it, and not so much for information as contemplation. The narratives are mostly in the first person to grasp the power of story-telling, express passion for subjects, tell anecdotes, and share humor wherever possible. The concise essays divided among six sections are sprinkled with quotations and extracts from favorite authors and poets. The subjects are close to the author’s heart and experience. He writes about the struggle for a sustainable environment and how shifting baselines affect perspectives. He appeals for a new appreciation of animals, not just sentimental feelings but a fresh respect for their welfare, sentience, and distinct intelligence. From deep involvement in the fertility revolution and IVF technology, he looks back at the history of discovery and turns a lens on what the future may portend. He expresses outrage at pervasive prejudice against ‘others’ in an extraordinary collection of topics, including Neanderthals, cannibals, scavengers, crustaceans, and feral pets. The story of evolution is never out of focus, and he pays another visit to the ghost of Down House close to where he grew up. For a foody culture, he draws on physiology credentials to poke a head inside the pantry, and elsewhere celebrates seasons of the year from oblique angles. The six memoirs of the last section have an elegiac tone, although they are never gloomy narratives of special places and people we have lost and must not forget. The reader will follow a zealous search in these pages for antidotes to the pessimism of our age through curiosity for knowledge and, finally, to hope. It is endless toil starting with questions for which the author does not pretend to offer prescriptions for hard issues, and, in the end, admits he is a philosopher with no clothes. He only professes to be a journeyman, because the writing craft is never finished and perfect, and in aiming for economy he understands words are like ammunition, the fewer bullets in the magazine the more accurately they must be aimed. Primarily oriented to America where he lives and the British Isles where he spent half a lifetime, his subjects stretch beyond those borders as far away as New Guinea and New Zealand. The style is personal, even intimate, as he reaches back to history, memory, and experience, which sounds alien territory for most scientists. He has thrown off the straight-jacket of academia to leave behind the buzz of lecture halls and nitty-gritty of laboratory life for the freedoms a writer enjoys. His career stretched from Cambridge to Cornell Universities, and it was during those decades he began to hone the craft and published two trade books as well as public media works. This first of two volumes is offered for reflective reading either at a sitting or for dipping into on-the-go or as a nightcap.

346 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 11, 2017

About the author

Roger Gosden chose a career in medical science but has a lifelong passion for nature and writing. He holds doctorates from Cambridge and Edinburgh Universities where he began a research career under Robert Edwards (Nobel Prize, 2010). He was a research director and professor of reproductive science in Edinburgh, Leeds, McGill, and Eastern Virginia, and his last post was at Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York City. In addition to around 300 scientific articles and books, he has been a journal editor, conference organizer and broadcaster, and writer for newspapers and magazines. He is married to Dr. Lucinda Veeck Gosden who was the embryologist for the first successful in vitro fertilization program in America. They live in Williamsburg, Virginia.