Ben Franklin Stilled the Waves: An Informal History Pouring Oil on Water with Reflections on the Ups and Downs of Scientific Life in General

Originally published by Duke University Press in 1989, and presented here with a new preface. Tanford (physiology, Duke U.) shows how science came to view the cell through various stages, starting with the physical concept that oil and water don't mix. He describes the various people who worked to find the structures necessary for cells to remain cells, and to discern their properties. Not entirely biography and also not entirely physiology, this text combines the two to describe the scientific life from the eighteenth century to the 1970s.