One Step Sideways, Three Steps Forward: One Woman’s Path to Becoming a Biologist

Evolutionary biologist Grant (40 Years of Evolution) reflects in this inspiring memoir on the challenges she’s faced as a woman in science. She traces the origins of her vocation to her 1940s upbringing in Northern England, where she discovered fossils in Arnside’s “carboniferous limestone cliffs” and learned about birds from her family’s gardener. Though college entrance exam administrators initially denied Grant’s request to take the test (they claimed her tuition would be better spent on her brothers’ educations), they relented in the face of her persistence and she went on to study zoology and genetics at the University of Edinburgh. After marrying biologist Peter Grant in the early 1960s, she postponed her PhD studies to raise their two daughters. She never lost her passion for biology, however, and even hired a babysitter every Monday so she could catch up on research trends at the library. (She eventually earned her PhD from Sweden’s Uppsala University in 1985.) Grant provides a detailed account of her groundbreaking fieldwork on Darwin’s finches in the Galápagos, which revealed that interbreeding between species is a significant contributor to species differentiation, and the material on how she balanced motherhood and a pioneering scientific career uplifts. The result is an intimate look at a life spent in dogged pursuit of scientific knowledge. Photos. (June)