The thoughts and deeds of great thinkers always make great stories, and here we have one hundred all together. Each story relates a ponderable, a weighty problem that became a discovery that changed the world.

Knowledge does not arrive fully formed, it required many minds to puzzle over the evidence, and, step by step, edge ever closer to an answer. This book tracks the history of biology, where scientists have wondered at the great diversity of living things on Earth and set out to understand the most complex process in the Universe - life itself.