Annal:1999 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science & Technology

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Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 1999. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:

Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love

Dava Sobel

Inspired by her long fascination with Galileo, and by the remarkable surviving letters of his daughter, which Sobel has translated into English for the first time, Galileo’s Daughter is a book of great originality and power, a biography unlike any ever written on Galileo. Sobel, the author of the bestseller Longitude, brings Galileo to life as never before-boldly compelled to explain the truths he discovered, human in his frailties and faith, devoted to family, especially to his eldest daughter.

The voices of Galileo and his daughter, Suor Maria Celeste, echo down the centuries through letters and writings, which Sobel masterfully weaves into her narrative, building toward the crescendo of history’s most dramatic collision between science and religion. In the process, she illuminates an entire era, when the flamboyant Medici grand dukes became Galileo’s patrons, when the bubonic plague wreaked its terrible devastation and prayer was the most effective medicine, when the Thirty Years’ War tipped fortunes across Europe, and when one man fought, through his trial and betrayal by…
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Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures With Wolf-Birds

Bernd Heinrich

In Mind of the Raven, Bernd Heinrich, award-winning naturalist, finds himself dreaming of ravens and decides he must get to the truth about this animal reputed to be so intelligent.

Much like a sleuth, Heinrich involves us in his quest, letting one clue lead to the next. But as animals can only be spied on by getting quite close Heinrich adopts ravens, thereby becoming a “raven father,” as well as observing them in their natural habitat, studying their daily routines, and in the process painting a vivid picture of the world as lived by the ravens. At the heart of this book are Heinrich’s love and respect for these complex and engaging creatures, and through his keen observation andanalysis, we become their intimates too.

Throughout history there has existed an extraordinary relationship between humans and ravens. Ravens, like early humans, are scavengers on the kills of great carnivores. As scavengers, ravens were associated with hunters they found in the north: wolves and, later, men. The trinity of wolf, man, and raven in the hunt is an extremely ancient one. In considering…
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The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS

Edward Hooper

Based on over a decade of research, involving more than 600 interviews and analysis of more than 4,000 scientific texts, The River examines the myriad theories about the origin of the AIDS epidemic—and reaches a stunning and startling conclusion.

Since the early nineties, serious HIV researchers have been aware that the most common variant of HIV—human immunodeficiency virus—is the direct descendant of an SIV—simian immunodeficiency virus—carried by African chimpanzees. Many doctors and scientists think the transfer was “natural,” the result of human/chimp encounters—either from the keeping of chimps as pets, or from hunting and skinning chimps for food. Others, including Edward Hooper, believe it more likely that the transfer was the result of American and European medical interventions in Africa during the 1950s—and specifically the administration of more than a million doses of an experimental oral polio vaccine, some batches of which may have been manufactured from chimp kidneys. The maps of vaccinations and early AIDS cases are extraordinarily similar.
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Lucy's Legacy: Sex and Intelligence in Human Evolution

Alison Jolly

Alison Jolly believes that biologists have an important story to tell about being human—not the all-too-familiar tale of selfishness, competition, and biology as destiny but rather one of cooperation and interdependence, from the first merging of molecules to the rise of a species inextricably linked by language, culture, and group living.

This is the story that unfolds in Lucy’s Legacy, the saga of human evolution as told by a world-renowned primatologist who works among the female-dominant ringtailed lemurs of Madagascar. We cannot be certain that Lucy was female—the bones themselves do not tell us. However, we do know, as Jolly points out in this erudite, funny, and informative book, that the females who came after Lucy—more adept than their males in verbal facility, sharing food, forging links between generations, migrating among places and groups, and devising creative mating strategies—played as crucial a role in the human evolutionary process as “man” ever did.

In a book that takes us from the first cell to global society, Jolly shows us that to learn where…
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The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

Simon Singh

Codes have decided the fates of empires, countries, and monarchies throughout recorded history. Mary, Queen of Scots was put to death by her cousin, Queen Elizabeth, for the high crime of treason after spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham cracked the secret code she used to communicate with her conspirators. And thus the course of British history was altered by a few sheets of cryptic prose. This is just one link in humankind’s evolutionary chain of secret communication, and just one of the fascinating incidents recounted in The Code Book, written by bestselling author Simon Singh.

Combining a superb storyteller’s sense of drama and a scientist’s appreciation for technical perfection, Singh traces the evolution of secret writing from ancient Greek military espionage to the frontiers of computer science. The result is an epic tale of human ingenuity, with examples that range from the poignant to the peculiar to the world-historical.

There is the case of the Beale ciphers, which involves Wild West escapades, a cowboy who amassed a vast fortune, a buried treasure worth $20 million,…
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