This is an enormous brick of a book, and it has taken me simply an age to get through it, but get through it I have. Every single page. In some respects it is extraordinary, and I think the most effective thing about it, as it gives potted biographies of scientists (along with summaries of their work) is the sense of movement, of discoveries building on upon the other, as each person contributes their little share to advance the cause of scientific knowledge. Science, this book makes clear, is a community discipline. In service of this, the scale on which Asimov works here is immense, and the book covers scholars from Imhotep to Stephen Hawking, whose birth in 1942 marks the last of the 1510 biographies here. If I get nothing else from reading this, it is an appreciation for the waves of contribution and progress over time.

There are, however, some issues. Some of these are small and seriously picky, for instance the exclusion of some scientists. Obviously 1510 is a massive amount, and limitations have to be set, and no doubt most science fans who read this will note the absences of their particular favourites. In my case: there's no Lina Stern here. No Chien-Shiung Wu. The whole freakishly talented Bernoulli family is represented by Daniel alone. There is also, and I say this with nothing but disgust (for the man if not the omission) no Josef Mengele. The history of science needs to drag the cockroaches of the vocation into the light as well, and I understand perfectly why Asimov, born of a Jewish family as he was, did not want to do so - especially as the subtitle of this book refers to the lives and achievements of "great scientists", and Mengele was only great in monstrosity as far as I am concerned. Yet Fritz Haber gets a sympathetic listing, and that fucker was the father of chlorine gas and chemical warfare. Asimov does try to be objective, I think, but there is on the whole little engagement with potentially difficult subjects when they intersect with the lives of the scientists in question - consider, as another example, the entry on Alan Turing and the total lack of acknowledgement of the persecution he experienced.

You can argue that these are minor issues, but what dropped this down from four stars to three, for me, was a rather more serious limitation. It was a struggle to finish this book, it was, and that was mostly because the focus was so narrow. To be blunt, if a scientist's research couldn't win a Nobel Prize, Asimov wasn't interested... and this holds for the research performed before the prizes were established. It is an exaggeration to say that there are a hundred articles on scientists who studied electrons and none on scientists who studied ecology, but it is not a very large exaggeration. No doubt this results from the author's own chemical background, but the vast, vast number of biographies here focus on chemistry and physics, and when biology gets a look-in it is mostly only to do with medicine or physiology (i.e. that which could win a Nobel), and even then the entries are noticeably shorter. The focus on nuclear physics is fucking interminable, and you could slog your way through this book and be forgiven for thinking that, in the whole of human history, only a tiny handful of people ever gave a damn about anthropology, archaeology, psychology, zoology, ecology, and so forth.

If this was an encyclopaedia of chemists, physicists, and physiologists it would earn its four stars alright, but this markets itself as an encyclopaedia of scientists, full stop, and there it falls down somewhat.