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Discovering the laws of life: portraits by Redi, Maupertuis, Trembley, von Humboldt, Wallace, Mendel

A new book by dr. Federico Focher entitled "Alla scoperta delle leggi della vita. Ritratti di Redi, Maupertuis, Trembley, Humboldt, Wallace, Mendel" was published (editor "Il prato").

Every scientific discovery, however revolutionary, is not born from nothing, but it is the last flower of a great tree, without which it would never have blossomed. Certainly you could just admire the cut flower, but only by knowing the leaves, the branch on which it shows itself, the tree as a whole, and the gnarled roots from which it has been nourished, you can fully understand the beauty and the meaning of that flower. Because, as Isaac Asimov once said, Science is not the flower, which will one day wither, but the whole tree, which will continue to live.

With the aim of recovering the memory of the roots of biological thought, in this book are portrayed six scientists who, looking for the truth, have marked some milestones of the natural sciences. Among the many who deserved to be remembered, were not deliberately chosen the most famous, but those who, despite their indisputable importance in the history of science, are less known today, or those who, like Gregor Mendel, are not known in their personal aspects and in their training as scientists, because obscured by a cumbersome posthumous monument.