Foundational and I'd say still unsurpassed as a history of the birth of molecular biology.

'Around that time, the late 1970s and very early 1980s, I became much more interested in nonfiction, especially nonfiction about science, and found myself reviewing such books for The Christian Science Monitor: the letters of Robert Oppenheimer, for instance, and a book of memoirs by Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, and a magnificent book (more magnificent than I was capable of appreciating then) on the foundational history of molecular biology, The Eighth Day of Creation, by Horace Freeland Judson.'

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/06/24/who-swims-with-the-scientist-david-quammen/