We think of life and death as clear cut — you’re alive or you’re not; your heart’s beating or it isn’t; your brain functions or it doesn’t. But when you look a bit deeper, both on a biological level, ...

At midnight on Christmas Day, 1910, a sleepless legal clerk of the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague was chastising himself for the state of his writing desk.

The modern science biography must hold back no punches in its mission to represent the subject’s life, equally celebrating their great works while including their personal shortcomings. Jürgen Neffe’s ...