To Make the World Intelligible: A Scientist's Journey is both a book about a life of science and about the science of life. In it, Franklin M. Harold shares the story of his life as a German immigrant, who lived in the Middle East before coming to America and finding his place in life as a scientist. But Harold's story does not stand in isolation. It is set against the heyday of biochemistry and molecular biology: a time when the staid science of biology was being transformed from a descriptive study of animals and plants into an intense inquiry into how living things work at the level of cells and molecules.
Harold then builds on this backdrop by sharing some of his research and that of his mentor and Nobel Prizewinner Peter Mitchell, as well as his insights and reflections on life as a phenomenon of nature. The accessible, comprehensive, and yet lyrical way that Harold accomplishes this is a testament to his belief that a scientist's raison d'être is to make the world intelligible.