About the Authors

From left to right: Michèle Shuster, Matthew Tontonoz, Janet Vigna

Michèle Shuster, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the biology department at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico. She focuses on the scholarship of teaching and learning, studying introductory biology, microbiology, and cancer biology classes at the undergraduate level, as well as working on several K-12 science education programs. Michèle is an active participant in programs that provide mentoring in scientific teaching to postdoctoral fellows, preparing the next generation of undergraduate educators. She is the recipient of numerous teaching awards, including the Westhafer award for Teaching Excellence at NMSU. Michèle received her Ph.D. from the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at Tufts University School of Medicine, where she studied meiotic chromosome segregation in yeast.

Janet Vigna, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the biology department at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. She is a science education specialist in the Integrated Science Program, training and mentoring K-12 science teachers. Janet has 18 years of undergraduate teaching experience, with a special interest in effectively teaching biology to nonmajors. She has recently been recognized with the GVSU Outstanding Teacher Award. Her scholarly interests include biology curriculum development, the effective use of digital media in science education, and research on the effects of biological pesticides on amphibian communities. She received her Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Iowa.

Matthew Tontonoz has been a development editor for textbooks in introductory biology, cell biology, biochemistry, evolution, and environmental science. After a brief stint in medical school in California, he realized he was better suited to saving sentences than saving lives. Matt received his B.A. in biology from Wesleyan University and his M.A. in the history and sociology of science from the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently staff science writer at the Cancer Research Institute, where he covers advances in cancer immunology and blogs about the history of medicine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Gunjan Sinha has been writing about science for over a decade. Her articles have been published in Science, Nature Medicine, Nature Biotechnology, Scientific American, and several other magazines and journals. She holds a graduate degree in molecular genetics from the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and a graduate degree in journalism from New York University. She currently works as a freelance science journalist and lives in Berlin, Germany.

DEAR READER,

Thank you for opening this book! We hope that your journey through it will be as rewarding for you as our journey in writing it has been. When we first came together to collaborate on the development of this text, our biggest goal was to get students interested in biology by showing its relevance to daily life. We wanted to create a textbook that students would actually want to read. Our model and partner in this process has been Scientific American, a visually stunning magazine that’s been successfully bringing science to the public for more than 150 years. The result is a unique textbook that takes a novel approach to teaching biology, one that we think has the potential to greatly improve learning. We hope that this brief introduction will serve as a road map of the book, so that you can get the most out of your experience with it and be as captivated by the wonders of life as we are.

The main approach of each chapter is the presentation of key science concepts within the context of a relevant and engaging story—a story of discovery, of determination, of human interest, of adventure. From the search for life on Mars to the problem of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, we use stories to bring science to life and to show scientists in action. After all, science is not just a collection of facts, so why would we present it that way? We ask you, our students, to study biology so you can use knowledge to make choices in the real world. We value those stories that will lead you to ask questions about life and how it works and to see the relevance of biology to daily activity. We have seen how stories engage students in our classrooms, and we hope you will be similarly intrigued.

While gripped by a story, you may not even realize how much you are learning. To reinforce the basic learning process, we rely on several strategies:

• Each story is prefaced by a set of Driving Questions. By keeping these in mind as you navigate the story, you will have a good framework for learning the key science concepts.
• Eye-catching Infographics highlight and drill down into the science of each story. The set of Infographics in a chapter provides a science storyboard for that chapter, illustrating the key scientific concepts and linking them to the story.
• Key terms are defined in the margins, making it easy to check a definition without having to leave the story.
• Chapter summaries provide a concise set of bullet points that distill the key scientific concepts.
• Test Your Knowledge questions at the end of each chapter reinforce basic facts and also allow the facts to be applied through data interpretation and mini cases.

By taking full advantage of these resources, you will be better able to appreciate how biology affects each and every one of us as well as our close and distant relatives on this planet. We hope that you will talk about biology with your friends and family, and that what you learn here will be applicable to your life. We hope that you will think as critically about every decision you make in the future as we will ask you to do here in these pages.

Welcome to Biology for a Changing World. We hope that you enjoy your journey, and complete it more prepared for your life in a changing world.

MICHÈLE SHUSTER JANET VIGNA MATTHEW TONTONOZ GUNJAN SINHA

Science taught through stories

Modern magazine look and feel

Driving Questions are the roadmap for each chapter

More ways to practice each Driving Question

New data problems, case studies, and Bring it Home activities in each chapter

Digital Resources Complete the Package