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Why biology is so hard! The 'peculiarly difficult position' of the Biologist: an analysis of Zinssers' view of the sciences.

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This essay was s ubmitted in partial fulfillment of my degree of Bachelor of Science  (Honours), Department of Zoology, The University of Western  Australia (June 2001). I recently was talking about this with a colleague and I thought I would share it. It's a long, but hopefully interesting read about why being a biologist can be more difficult than a chemist or a physicist.  Hans Zinsser Hans Zinsser (1947) presents in his book; Rats, Lice and History, a bibliography on the virus causing typhus fever. The first three chapters, however, present more of a protest against the "American attitude" wherein the author insists that a specialist should have no interests beyond his chosen field. In presenting this view Zinsser compares biologists to chemists or physicists and makes an interesting quote (Zinsser 1947, p. 13)       "The biologist is in a peculiarly difficult position. He cannot isolate individual reactions and study them one by one, as a chemist can