I’m very excited about the paperback release of my book ’ The Man in the Monkeynut Coat’ by Oxford University Press in 2022. The book tells the story of pioneering scientist William Astbury whose X-ray studies of wool wove an unlikely path to unravelling the structure of DNA, the genetic material. When the book was first published in 2014 it was featured on a list of ‘Books of 2014’ in ‘The Guardian’ and was shortlisted for the 2015 British Society for the History of Science Dingle Prize.
But the paperback will be much more than just a reprint of the original. I like to think of it as a ‘director’s cut’ containing material that never made it into the earlier book such as the story of Laszlo Lorand, a young medical student who fled the Communist authorities in his native Hungary to arrive at Astbury’s lab in Leeds in the middle of winter with only a suitcase at his side but went on to figure out how blood clots form. There’s also much more about the intriguing story of how Astbury used X-rays to probe the molecular structure of Mozart’s hair. But perhaps most importantly of all, the book looks at how a coat made from monkey nut proteins has a powerful relevance for a world shaped by Covid-19…