Oscar Wilde died primarily because of a jail term.

This ignominious demise seemed an ironic contrast to his career as a powerful, clever writer, one who achieved success fairly early in life. His lightning-like wit thundered across the great skies of literary London. He became their instant darling, writing poems and plays deliriously received by large, enthusiastic audiences. Wilde was the quintessential ‘dandy,’ wearing outrageous ties, lacy frocks and multi-colored coats that glittered in the stage lights.

Oscar Wilde's downfall occurred primarily because of his sexuality. By the time he was 32, he was married, parental and bored. He began a sexual relationship with a teenaged boy named Robert Ross. This was the inaugural liaison of a pattern which culminated in a dalliance with Lord Alfred Douglas, the son of a very prominent English family. Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, discovered the relationship and wrote Wilde a note about it. In the mistake that would cost the writer his life, Oscar Wilde threw a lawsuit at the father. The marquess was used to fighting (this was the same gentleman who defined the Queensberry rules for boxing), and he countercharged that Wilde had numerous liaisons with young boys. The playwright was arrested and, in a scandal that rocked the literary world of the time, put on trial.

In court, things at first went well for the playwright. His wit sparkled with characteristic brilliance even upon cross-examination.

It was not the most welcoming way to be born into the planet.

The doctors thought that Samuel Johnson, the great author and conversationalist, was still-born. Fortunately for Western literature, he was not abandoned. The future writer was shaken, slapped, cajoled, yelled at and paddled until he convincingly shrieked his vitality into existence. The events of his birth were simply a foreshadowing of a troubled medical future, however. Samuel Johnnson would not die until the age of 75, and not until he had experienced most of the known ailments and diseases of his day.

As a baby, Samuel Johnson contracted tuberculosis and developed a glandular infection of the neck. In his later years he suffered asthma, dropsy, emphysema, gallstones, gout, hydrocele (swelling of the scrotum), manic depression, a diseased bladder which left him incontinent and chronic bronchitis. ‘My health seldom afforded me a single day of ease,’ Johnson wrote about his troubles.

His senses were not left untouched, either. His bouts with disease left him blind in one eye and partially deaf. There was a point when Johnson suffered aphasia, a temporary loss of speech, probably due to a cerebral hemorrhage. The only sense that seemed to amplify with the passing years was a constant feeling of pain.

Despite these sensory losses, Johnson was able to live through the better part of seven decades, an astonishing achievement for anyone living in the 18th century.

If there ever was an example of a deliberately programmed demise of a famous historical figure, it was the events surrounding the death of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Once, the emperor was the most towering figure in all of Europe. His exile to St Helena at the age of 46 was a crushing fall from greatness. In many ways, it illustrates the enormous contradictions of the man, his physical height and his political stature, his recklessness and his careful strategizing, his adversity and his luck. In 1815 (the year of his exile), he was already more myth than man, and his legendary ability to rise from obscurities still produced dread in his enemies. He was banished to the south Atlantic in part from fear. His own words echoed his frustration: ‘Ability is of little account without opportunity.’

Arriving on the island, he immediately settled into a life of routine. His health was robust, he had many years to live (so he thought) and he had much of the island at his disposal. Every morning, the former emperor awoke at 9:00, performed his morning toilette, and had breakfast at 10:00. Though he was free to explore, Napoleon never wandered far from his assigned house. Instead, he spent much of his day ‘writing’ – dictating to his secretary, really – various notes, letters and eventually a will for posterity. He dined at 7:00, read from the books in his library (he was fond of the classics) and retired for the evening at 11:00.

In the world of strange and unusual wills, the last requests of Charles Millar must rank as the most capricious of all time.

In life, Millar was a quiet man. Friends even described him as straitlaced. But he had another, far more interesting side. Millar was a Canadian attorney and, unknown to many, fabulously wealthy. Probably reasoning that death made these quiet constraints pointless, he funneled all his capriciousness, humor and satire into his last will and testament. This was accomplished by donating large sums of money with interesting conditions attached. In so doing, Millar showed to the world its desire for greed, and the great lengths to which people would go, to receive money – even from dead people.

Some of his victims were professional acquaintances. He had friends, for example, who were judges and preachers. Several of them had a vocal and quite public opposition to organized gambling. One judge always ruled severely when cases involving gambling came through his court. One preacher gave fiery sermons on the spiritual degradation inflicted by the addictive demon.

Knowing the structure of DNA – and how it works – has created many exciting new possibilities in the world of biotechnology (the use of biological processes to make useful products). Probably the most important technology to flow from Crick and Watson's discovery is genetic engineering.

The tools of genetic engineering allow the transfer of genes from one species to another. Because different species cannot usually breed with one another and exchange genetic material, genetic engineering opens up the prospect of creating novel species. These have the potential to widen the scope of biotechnology in ways that will have a major impact on medicine, agriculture and the environment.

For instance, the first commercial example of genetic engineering involved the transfer of the gene for human insulin to the bacterium E. coli. While humans and bacteria share a common ancestor, they can breed together only on the wilder shores of science fiction. With genetic engineering, a bacterium can acquire a human gene – and treat it as one of its own. In some ways there is nothing very new about this; every time you get a cold you acquire unwelcome viral genes, but the point about genetic engineering is having some control over the transfer process. Genetic engineering always creates an organism with a novel genome, although it usually only differs by one gene from its genetically unmodified counterpart. So an E. coli bacterium with a human insulin gene does not look remotely human, or in any other way unusual!

Sometimes the creation of a novel organism is incidental and it is the product that the organism makes which is the target of the process.

‘I cannot continue to live in a world where there are beautiful blue-eyed, golden haired children. I cannot!’

These anguished words came from the lungs of one of the world's legendary dancers, Isadora Duncan. She was reacting to the painful loss of her own two children, Deirdre (aged five) and Patrick (aged three). They had drowned some years before, trapped inside a car that had plunged into the river. She uttered her despairing words often, whenever she saw living children that looked like her own little ones. Ironically, Duncan's own life would be cut short by a traffic accident too. And it would also involve a form of strangulation.

Isadora Duncan was born in San Fransisco in 1878. At an early age, she rediscovered the ancient Hellenistic ideas about freestyle movement and dance. Duncan was captivated immediately. She elevated these old principles, which were very much in contrast to the formal ballet regimen, to a creative artform for the 19th century. Duncan learned to coordinate voice with movement, spontaneity with grace and, like so many geniuses, innovation with ego. Early in her career, she remarked to a theatrical producer during an audition: ‘I have discovered the art which had been lost for two thousand years. I bring you the idea that is going to revolutionize our entire epoch.’

She was not wrong, even in the opinion of her critics. Her dancing spread her fame around the world in giant leaps.

There are many stories surrounding the life and death of Billy the Kid. Most of the stories are false. The media, no less hungry for a tabloid story in the 19th century as in the 20th, freely interspersed a few grains of truth with Wild West superstition. About the only place where the legends and facts agree is this outlaw's age of death – 21 years, 7 months and 22 days. The larger-than-life stories sadly obscure the real history of this man's short life. It is much more poignant than heroic, more melancholy than malevolent.

Billy the Kid's real name was Henry McCarty. He wasn't born in the Wild West, he was born in a Manhattan tenement slum. To escape poverty, his Dad moved the family to Coffeyville, Kansas and very quickly died. Henry's mother, now a single parent, had the daunting task of making a living in the gritty cruelty of the mid-19th century American West. It was a testimony to her resourcefulness and intelligence (and the genesis of young Henry's undying devotion) that she was able to make a go of it. She supported herself and her son in business – operating hotels, laundries and boarding houses, and even dealing in real estate. By all accounts Henry grew up well-loved and increasingly well-supported. If it hadn't been for the visit of the now-familiar Mycobacterium tuberculosis on the McCarty household, there might never have been a substrate upon which to build this legend.

Plants support life on earth, primarily by transforming the energy of the Sun into the chemical energy of food during photosynthesis. They are also the raw materials for medicine and natural textiles.

For the last several thousand years, we have done our best to mould plants to our needs with agriculture. Traditional breeding methods have tried to exploit the best of what the plant world has to offer. Now biotechnology and genetic engineering are opening up major new possibilities, not only of breeding plants with desirable characteristics but also of creating entirely new plant species. To date, the commercial success of plant biotechnology has been limited. However, its scope is potentially very broad – from providing food for a growing world population to introducing novel flowers such as blue roses and brick-red petunias.

One cell, one plant

Biotechnology applied to plants takes advantage of the fact that – unlike animal cells – plant cells are totipotent. This means that the pattern of gene expression in a plant cell gives it the potential of becoming any kind of cell in the mature plant. So a plant cell could end up in the stem, leaf, flower or root. Animal cells, however, are pluripotent. They can only become one of a limited group of cell types. Stem cells, for example, which are produced by the bone marrow of humans and other vertebrates, could become any one of a number of white blood cells used by the body to fight infection. But they could never become nerve cells, or muscle cells.

She was lying on the bed, her husband close beside her. He stroked her forehead as if it was china. ‘Knowledge by suffering entereth,’ she said, deliriously quoting her own poetry, ‘And life is perfected by death.’

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, her husband cradling her body, was experiencing the last morning of her life. It was, by all accounts, an appropriate end to one of the world's great poets and to one of the world's more interesting love affairs. The illness that would take her life was no stranger; in fact most of Elizabeth's life was divided into repeating stanzas of accident and disease; it wasn't until she met her husband, Robert, that she received any respite from the various aches and pains life threw her way.

The place where Elizabeth suffered her inaugural trauma was also the center of her universe – her family home. One of 11 children, she grew up in a rich English household, dominated by an imperious father. She had been schooled there, learning to read and write in Greek, Latin, Italian, German and Hebrew.

Elizabeth fell from a horse at the age of 15. The spinal injuries she received made her a virtual shut-in. Her father, already repressive and overbearing, became the jailer in what was essentially a gentrified prison. She would be sentenced to the confines of her house for 16 years.

Even if it's not true, you have to admit, it makes a great story. Ludwig van Beethoven was in bed, suffering from the diseases that would take his life. His abdomen was swollen with fluids, his liver in a severe state of dysfunction, his lungs losing a battle with pneumonia. And of course, his ears, filled with the unwelcome cement of otosclerosis, colored all this suffering in the opacity of silence. Beethoven was a medical wreck.

These multiple biological assaults were a familiar theme in Beethoven's life, even in his younger years. He probably suffered from lupus erythematosus, an autoimmune disease in which soldiers of the immune system suddenly attack healthy body cells. He also suffered from continual diarrhea and a variety of intestinal disorders, so severe that its pain often prostrated him. This combination of diseases culminated in periodic, debilitating rounds of depression. These the composer called ‘as great an evil’ as his hearing loss. All this pathology made him a grumpy, cantankerous man in his later years.

In 1815, the now deaf composer was awarded the guardianship of his nephew, a child of Beethoven's recently deceased brother Caspar. Though there was great love between them, they fought constantly. Just before taking his university entrance examinations in 1826, the boy shot himself. Horrified, Beethoven bundled up the wounded nephew, went out into a terrific winter storm and dropped him off at the home of a relative.

The knowledge of the structure and function of DNA is probably the most powerful concept in biology, standing, as it does, at the very heart of our understanding of inheritance, and co-ordination of the biochemical activity of the cell. For some scientists, the molecular approach to the science of life–with DNA as the master molecule – provides a comprehensive understanding of nature. Unsolved problems such as the nature of human consciousness or how an embryo develops will be clarified as soon as the appropriate genes are cloned – they say. Others argue that molecular genetics is only part of a far larger picture and that other theories and ideas are equally worthy of attention and further exploration.

Neo-Darwinism and the selfish gene

Neo-Darwinism, as a theory, is not as modern as it sounds. The term was first coined in 1896, and refers to the synthesis of the work of Darwin with that of Mendel. Just to recap, Darwin's observations of nature led him to propose that variation of phenotype within species occurred, and the variants that were best adapted to the environment would leave more offspring (‘the survival of the fittest’). Thus, life evolved through the generations. Mendel took one step further towards a mechanism for inheritance with his experimental discovery of genes as being discrete inheritable entities.

The discovery of the self-replication of DNA, and of gene mutations that were transmitted from cell to cell, and through the generations, provided a powerful explanation for both Darwin's and Mendel's theories at a fundamental molecular level. Genes are stretches of DNA.

DNA, RNA and proteins are all molecules with a history. The study of how they have changed over time has given us a new perspective on evolution, and our place in nature. At the genetic level, evolution can be summed up as the production of new genes, their inheritance, and their selection by interactions with the environment. The fluid and dynamic nature of DNA has caused cellular life to fan out from the microbes that populated the Earth nearly four billion years ago, to the rich diversity of species we have today.

Origins

Creationists – who believe that God put each species on Earth fully formed – are conveniently sidestepping one of the toughest problems in science, that of how life began. Charles Darwin developed a convincing theory of how the earliest life forms evolved into more complex organisms. But he could not say how the first organism - often called the progenote – arose.

We will probably never know the truth about the origins of life, but there is no shortage of theories. Chemistry, cosmology and geology have all provided far more fruitful and imaginative notions about how life emerged on this planet than the creationists' stereotyped theories.

Before exploring some of the scientific ideas about the origins of life – and DNA – we ought to set the scene by trying to imagine just what our planet was like in its youth. This is not the place to go into complicated cosmological theories, so we will accept that the Universe came into being around 15 billion years ago with an event called the Big Bang.