How did our scientific quest to understand life begin? From the earliest questioning about the origins of life to the first use of the word virus, this compelling and informative book unfolds the history of biology itself. For most of human history, we havent known the secrets of life itself. In this fascinating book, Joy Hakim, takes us back through time to biologys beginnings. Observe the inquisitive scholars of Ancient Greece and the Islamic Golden Age as they began to ask questions about how the human body works; journey to the Renaissance where Leonardo da Vinci was dissecting cadavers to uncover human anatomy; and stop in the late 1800s, where a baffled Dutch biologist found a tiny infectious particle destroying tobacco crops, which he named virus.