... and a long story about some antiquated biology books I picked up at a fair a few years ago.
This blogpost got written and rewritten several times, and even ended up on my Mastodon account, before I finally decided to write something more complete.
I have been moving house recently, which, if you've never done something like this before, means a lot of time spent packing things into boxes and bags, and probably a while also wondering why you even keep half of that stuff. I hold onto a lot of old electronics like smashed laptops, LPDDR3 RAM, TV boxes, and more, though they have been useful often enough to merit no questioning.
Instead I did got asked by my dad, slightly exasperated, why I keep a couple of old biology books, and the reasons why are worth writing about.
These books date back to the 1960-70s, and actually belonged to my dad's biology teacher, back when he was in school. I picked them up for around $2 each at the school fair one day, motivated by my love of biology intersecting with my appreciation of old books. I studied biology for O levels, then AS levels, and had some really amazing, and frankly, progressive teachers who went above and beyond Cambridge's syllabus to teach a lot more about science and modern biology than we had to know for the exams.
The difference between the old, obsolete books, and my modern school books is what is particularly interesting and what I wanted to talk about here.
For starters, both books talk about DNA, the molecule holding genetic material used to build life. What is most interesting is that the old book mentions only Watson and Crick, two male researchers who were credited with the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA, while my school book also mention Rosalind Franklin, a female researcher whose X-rays were used (without her permission) by Watson and Crick to make the discovery. I definitely recommend reading up on these people and the discovery they made; it's the foundation on which a lot of modern medicine is founded. Unfortunately, at the time, Rosalind did not receive the credit she deserved, and went mostly unnoticed for her contributions to discovering the structure of DNA. Other interesting discoveries she made include the structure of RNA, viruses, coal, and graphite.
Another interesting difference can be seen in cell structure. In form 1, you learn about the nucleus, cell membrane, cytoplasm, and vacuoles. In form 6, you add onto that with the smooth/rough endoplasmic reticulum, golgi body, mitochondria, ribosomes, and all the little bits inside the nucleus. However, if handed the old biology books, you would be forgiven for thinking that you are in form 1 and not 6; the old diagrams make no reference to these tiny organelles in the cell, most of which were only discovered with high power electron microscopes and new imaging techniques. Since those organelles were not yet known or understood at the time, it made the understanding of the known organelles incomplete and flawed. One example is that the synthesis of proteins was thought to be done in the nucleus, while actually the ribosomes and rough endoplasmic reticulum found in the cytoplasm are involved in that process.
At the end of the day, I like keeping those old books as relics of a time when we knew so little and could be so completely wrong. They are worthless to learn about biology, but nonetheless provide a window into what the world was like back then. Also, they are nice reminders of how science works - knowledge which is the consensus one day may be invalidated by a discovery the next, and it is the duty of the community to learn and adapt and continuously evolve.
This is what inspired the title of this blogpost. "it's basic biology" has become a common saying among those who want to deny scientific progress and the insist on past knowledge which is now known to be inaccurate or wrong. Basic maths said you can't do the square root of -1, while advanced maths makes you represent it as i and work with complex numbers. Basic physics taught you there were only 3 states of matter, while modern physics recognises like 4? 7?
Small interjection: while writing this, I wanted to make sure I was as up-to-date as possible, so went to look up (wikipedia) the number of states of matter and got too confused to give a definitive number. I may be confused but you won't see me calling Bose–Einstein condensate a mental illness. I digress.
What was a short answer to my dad about why I find old books cool evolved into a full conversation about scientific progress, how social settings influence the science we learn, and how those books are amazing point-in-time snapshots of our understanding of the living world back in the 1960s. That being said, it also makes me feel funny to open them and think to myself "wow, i actually know more than the author of the book and the educational system which taught this".