The Course of Nature

Humanity is a part of Nature, yet every thinking person at one time or another asks herself or himself, "How did we get here? What makes me different from the rest of Nature?" In The Course of Nature an artist and a scientist ask those questions with full respect for all contexts, both scientific and not. Amy Pollack's figures stand on their own as elegant summaries of one or another aspect of Nature and our place in it. Robert Pollack's one-page essays for each illustration lay out the underlying scientific issues along with the overarching moral context for these issues. Together the authors have created a door into Nature for the non-scientist, and a door into the separate question of what is right, for both the scientist and the rest of us.
About the Author: Amy Pollack graduated from the New York City High School of Music and Art, then earned an B.F.A. from The Cooper Union, and a B.A. from Brandeis University with a major in Art History and with honors in Graphics. Her recent works include illustrations for publications of the Stevens Institute of Technology's College of Arts and Letters, illustrations for the Columbia University student magazine "Sanctum," and illustrations in "Crosscurrents" magazine. In addition to illustrating articles, she enjoys making soft sculptures, tee-shirt designs, collages and quilts. Her facility with scientific matters stems from summers spent at the Marine Biology Lab at Woods Hole Massachusetts, and on her work as a technician at Brandeis University, where she learned to make ribosomes from yeast. The Course of Nature is her first full-length book. An earlier version of The Course of Nature has been used as a reading in the Columbia College core course "Frontiers of Science," and in the Stevens Institute of Technology program in Arts and Letters. For more information about her work, see http: //pollackauthors.wordpress.com/ Robert Pollack graduated from Columbia University with a B.A. in physics, and received a Ph.D. in biology from Brandeis University. He has been a professor of biological sciences at Columbia since 1978, and was dean of Columbia College from 1982-89. He received the Alexander Hamilton Medal from Columbia University, and has held a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the author of Signs of Life: The Languages and Meanings of DNA (Houghton Mifflin/Viking Penguin, 1994), The Missing Moment: How the Unconscious Shapes Modern Science (Houghton Mifflin, 1999); and The Faith of Biology and the Biology of Faith: Meaning, Order and Free Will in Modern Medical Science (Columbia University Press, 2000). Signs of Life received the Lionel Trilling Award and has been translated into six languages. In 2010 he was elected to be the fourth Director of The University Seminars at Columbia. For more information about his work, see http: //pollackauthors.wordpress.com/