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 book unfolds the history of biology itself. Joy Hakim, takes readers back through time to biology's 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.