successful reproduction when the food supplyis restored.

Guarente makes a good case that SIR2epitomizes one kind of gene action of the sortthat Harrison and Holliday envisaged. It isresponsive to cellular nutrient status, andreacts to high NAD levels (and hence foodshortage) by shutting down gene activity.Precisely which genes are turned off may differ between organisms. Genes in theinsulin/IGF-like pathway, of which SIR2 maybe part, are also nutrient-sensitive regulatorsof gene expression, and affect the rate of age-ing in worm, fruitfly and mouse.

The indications so far from model organ-isms are that interventions that slow downageing can also improve age-specific health.Caloric restriction, for example, slows downthe accumulation of multiple forms of age-related damage and pathology in rodents.

Guarente is an optimist. He thinks thatdrugs targeted at products of genes such asSIR2 will become available in the next 10 or20 years to improve age-specific health andslow down ageing. Although voluntarycaloric restriction is not a feasible approachto improving human health, it may be possi-ble to target the pathway that mediates theresponse. Indeed, Guarente devotes much of his time to his biotech company Elixir, and has much of interest to say about the synergies and conflicts of interest betweenacademia and business. Ageless Quest con-veys some quite difficult ideas and complexexperimental results with a clarity and fresh-ness that deserve to make it widely read. ■

Linda Partridge is in the Department of Biology,University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK.

Bonding the two culturesThe Art of Chemistry: Myths,Medicines and Materialsby Arthur GreenbergWiley: 2003. 357 pp. £41.95, $59.95, E66.70

John Emsley

The Art of Chemistry is a companion to ArthurGreenberg’s earlier book, A Chemical HistoryTour (Wiley, 2000), and again he offers us a selection from his unique collection of historical material. If you enjoyed the earlierbook, which I did, then you will enjoy this aswell. It should appeal to chemists, historiansand artists, particularly those who are fasci-nated by alchemy and how this base sciencewas transmuted into the gold of chemistry.

The 71 essays are lavishly illustrated withpage after page of reproductions that capturethe chemical mood of the time, with Green-berg providing the necessary commentary. A few chapters merely whet the appetite

without satisfying it. The one entitled ‘Secrets of a Lady Alchemist’ concerns MarieMeurdrac, who was the first woman to writea book on chemistry, which was published in 1656, but the coverage is all too brief. So too is ‘A Promising President’, which gave mea glimpse of unexpected depths to former US president Herbert Hoover. He did a schol-arly translation of a 1556 book by Georgius Agricola, De re metallica (Of Things Metallic),from Latin into English.

While those essays left me hungry formore, they are the exception — most of themprovide a meaty meal. I particularly enjoyedthe one on William Prout’s hypothesis of1815, in which he theorized that all elementsare derived from hydrogen. This theory wasseen as demonstrably wrong in the nine-teenth century: if hydrogen’s atomic weightis 1, how can chlorine’s be 35.5? Never-theless, his hypothesis explained why mostatomic weights are integral numbers, and it was indeed prophetic. A century later,chemists learned that an element is identi-fied by the number of protons in its nucleusand, as hydrogen’s nucleus is a single proton,it can be seen as the element of the elements.

In a book that is largely pictures, onemight expect the accompanying text to bemerely an add-on, but The Art of Chemistry iswell written and peppered with Greenberg’switty comments and cynical asides, pro-viding light relief along the way, althoughsome are more toe-curling than amusing.

Sometimes his remarks require specialistknowledge, such as an understanding ofbaseball, because he likes to make compari-sons between the achievements of greatchemists and the giants of his favourite sport.

The more of the book I read, the more I kept on wanting to read, and indeed for me the more interesting essays come in the second half, culminating with the whim-sically titled ‘Section VIII (Some Fun)’ withits articles on occult chemistry and cigarettecards of famous chemists. If your interest is alchemy then the first dozen or so essays in ‘Section I (Spiritual and MythologicalRoots)’ and ‘Section II (Stills, Cupels, andWeapons)’ will be the main attraction.

In the 1950s, C. P. Snow wrote of ‘two cultures’ and the lack of communicationbetween them, and it really did seem that theworlds of art and science were like oil andwater: impossible to mix. They represent dif-ferent, though equally valid, ways of lookingat the world. But that should not preventartists from producing works with scientificthemes, or scientists from appreciating thework of artists. The two worlds have oftendrawn strength from each other and The Art of Chemistry proves that it can be done. I hope that it will encourage those who arecurrently struggling to meld the two. ■

John Emsley is a science writer in residence at the Department of Chemistry, University ofCambridge, Lensfield Road, Cambridge CB2 1EW,UK, and is the author of Nature’s Building Blocks.

book reviews

790 NATURE | VOL 421 | 20 FEBRUARY 2003 | www.nature.com/nature

Alchemy conjures upimages of mysterious menin dark laboratories,battling with forces theydon’t understand in avain effort to turn basemetal into gold. But onwhat are these imagesbased? Transmutations:Alchemy in Art byLawrence M. Principe andLloyd DeWitt (ChemicalHeritage Foundation,$25) brings togetheralchemical paintingsfrom the Eddleman andFisher collections at theChemical HeritageFoundation, based inPhiladelphia, includingThe Search for theAlchemical Formulaby Charles Meer Webb,shown here. This shortbook provides anintroduction to the dark dawn of modernchemistry.

Base instincts

© 2003 Nature Publishing Group