This biography probes the unusual mind, the dramatic life, and the outstanding scientific work of Danish-born immunologist Niels Jerne (1911-1994). Jerne's Nobel Prize-winning achievements in the field of immunology place him in the pantheon of great twentieth-century biomedical theorists, yet his life is perhaps even more interesting than his science. Science as Autobiography tells Jerne's story, weaving together a narrative of his life experiences, emotional life, and extraordinarily creative scientific work. A legendary figure who preferred an afternoon of conversation in a Paris wine bar to work in the laboratory, Jerne was renowned for his unparalleled powers of concentration and analytical keenness as well as his dissonant personal life. The book explores Jerne the man and scientist, making the fascinating argument that his life experience and view of himself became a metaphorical resource for the construction of his the ories. The book also probes the moral issues that surrounded Jerne's choice to sacrifice his family in favor of scientific goals and the pursuit of excellence.

"The Roofing Ceremony" is a powerful, ultimately hopeful short novel that will revise the narrow view of August Strindberg as merely a misogynist and the gloomiest of Scandinavian writers. This novel has an inwardness, irreducibly and complexly human, that looks back to Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich and forward to Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape.
Published in Sweden in 1906 and never before translated into English, "The Roofing Ceremony" (Taklagsol) anticipates in its turbulent intensity the chamber plays Strindberg was soon to write. It is about a dying man, once an explorer but now a museum curator, who reviews his tumultuous life aloud as he drifts in and out of a morphine-induced sleep. Sometimes fragmentary, sometimes episodic, this impressionistic monologue builds up a vivid and nuanced portrait of the curator and his estranged wife, chronicling passionately but also humorously the descent of their marriage from island idyll into bitter comedy into tragic estrangement. Strindberg anticipated in this work the modern psychological novel and the technique of stream-of-consciousness.

A curious, brief narrative Strindberg meant to incorporate into "The Roofing Ceremony" but never did is also included in this book, as well as a story called "The Silver Lake" written in 1898, which also appears in English for the first time. A museum curator, summering on a Baltic island, seeks out a forbidden lake and shares its enchantment with his wife and children. But his marriage is doomed, and when he returns to the lake alone, its mystery turns sinister.