Intuition

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 400 pages
• Published by: Dial Press Trade Paperback March 13, 2007
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0385336101
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0385336109
• Book Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Weighs: 9.6 ounces

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In another quiet but powerful novel from Goodman (Kaaterskill Falls), a struggling cancer lab at Boston's Philpott Institute becomes the stage for its researchers' personalities and passions, and for the slippery definitions of freedom and responsibility in grant-driven American science. When the once-discredited R-7 virus, the project of playboy postdoc Cliff, seems to reduce cancerous tumors in mice, lab director Sandy Glass insists on publishing the preliminary results immediately, against the advice of his more cautious codirector, Marion Mendelssohn. The research team sees a glorious future ahead, but Robin, Cliff's resentful ex-girlfriend and co-researcher, suspects that the findings are too good to be true and attempts to prove Cliff's results are in error. The resulting inquiry spins out of control. With subtle but uncanny effectiveness, Goodman illuminates the inner lives of each character, depicting events from one point of view until another section suddenly throws that perspective into doubt. The result is an episodically paced but extremely engaging novel that reflects the stops and starts of the scientific process, as well as its dependence on the complicated individuals who do the work. In the meantime, she draws tender but unflinching portraits of the characters' personal lives for a truly humanist novel from the supposedly antiseptic halls of science. (Feb. 28)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The New Yorker
This intimate portrait of life in a research institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, revolves around a scientific mystery: the groundbreaking, too-good-to-be-true discovery of a virus that fights cancer. Cliff, the rakish, headstrong post-doc responsible for the discovery, is on the verge of dismissal when his tumor-ridden mice exhibit stunning rates of remission; meanwhile, Cliff's co-worker and former girlfriend, spurred by personal and professional jealousy, begins to harbor suspicions about his lab work. The somewhat transparent plot is made compelling by the aesthetic delicacy of Goodman's writing—furless lab mice are "like quivering pink agar"—and by the care with which she sketches the social world of the lab. The omniscient narrative nimbly shifts perspective among a small number of complex characters, to produce a Rashomon-like inquiry into truth and motive.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Reader Reviews
This review is from: Intuition (Hardcover) "Intuition" is science as observed by Jane Austen rather than Michael Crichton. I was mesmerized from page one and cried when I reached the gentle revelation of the last scene. Science has long deserved a literary treatment by a great novelist and Allegra Goodman delivers with her carefully-examined microcosm. The novel is a character study rather than a whodunit, or more precisely, whodonewhat. The central plot of alleged fraud in the lab provides the dissecting knife to tease apart the complicated relationships among the lab mentors and serfs--postdoctoral researchers and technicians. Goodman absolutely nails the depiction of the claustrophobic, almost cloistered ambience and power structures of a high-powered research institute. She treats all of her characters with fairness and honesty, which is the key to the novel's success. I myself was a neuroscience graduate student at Stanford. Reading "Inutition" brought back those days, adding the gifts of compassion and universal perspective to my hindsight view of many challenging years of study. "Intuition" is an old-fashioned novel, and I am interested to know if that is why Allegra Goodman chose to set the story in the late 1980's (1987 is my best guess). This was a technologically simpler era of cell biology, the moment just before molecular biology and gene cloning took off. The particular science performed in "Intuition" is secondary. There are no whiz-bang scenes of technological madness. That's the brilliance of the novel: distilling scientific ambition, reward, disappointment and betrayal down to its human essence. "Intuition" is the rare book that will be enjoyed by lab geeks and English lit majors alike.