Best summer books of 2024: Science

Breaking Through: My Life in Science by Katalin Karikó (Bodley Head)

Karikó’s remarkable journey from childhood in a politically suspect butcher’s family on the plains of postwar Hungary to winning a Nobel Prize for medicine last year is a joy to read. She writes in a direct style rich in personal details while explaining well the science behind her research, particularly the fight over more than 30 years to prove that messenger RNA could play an important role in medicine.

Why We Die: The New Science of Ageing and the Quest for Immortality by Venki Ramakrishnan (Hodder Press/William Morrow)

Nobel laureate Ramakrishnan’s introduction to anti-ageing research is wonderfully readable. He describes how decades of experiments with yeast, worms, flies, mice and humans have built up evidence about the causes of senescence — and how it might be slowed or even reversed. The science is spiced with vivid analogies and potted biographies of the people behind the discoveries.

Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (Princeton University Press)

Evolutionary anthropologist Hrdy sets out to demolish the still prevalent view that, with the exception of lactation and breastfeeding, women are better suited than men to nurture babies and bring up infants. She employs cultural and scientific arguments going deep into mammalian evolution to show that, given the opportunity, the male biological response to babies is virtually the same as the female.

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Alien Earths: Planet Hunting in the Cosmos by Lisa Kaltenegger (Allen Lane/St Martin’s Press)

Astronomer Kaltenegger, a leader in the search for extraterrestrial life, describes vividly how her lab and others around the world are preparing to analyse observations of distant planets from a new wave of ultra-powerful telescopes, searching for signs of biological activity. Her story is literally colourful, because living organisms are likely to paint their home planets in distinctive organic hues that could not arise from geological processes alone.

Why We Remember: The Science of Memory and How It Shapes Us by Charan Ranganath (Faber)

Ranganath, an eminent neuroscientist, illuminates the processes of remembering and forgetting. His entertaining and thought-provoking book emphasises the remarkable fluidity of memory, as the brain extracts and stores the information likely to be most useful for the future while junking the rest.

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