Did this book inspire "Flowers for Algernon" & the "Charlie" film? Some sf historians think so. It's a story of a man raised from subnormal to superman overnight! At 1st he plans to benefit humanity. But when the transformation proves temporary, he wonders if he should save humanity or expunge it. Seeds of Life is sf tragedy as grand opera. It's also an enthralling hard science story with a human heart, mixing such ingredients as a black widow spider, a 2,000,000 volt X-ray tube, chicken eggs hatching reptilian monsters & other strange plot threads. When Dr Andrew Crane of the Erickson Foundation tries to make a man of Neils Bork, his lab assistant, whose interest in bottled inspiration is his chief weakness, he succeeds in a spectacular manner. Bork himself contributes to the end result in his own drunken way, & there emerges Miguel de Soto, a superman in every sense. His rate of thinking & perceiving has accelerated many times beyond that of any human. He's a partial, accidental anticipation of what humanity will become in the millenniums ahead. Seeds of Life is sf of a high order, a novel involving believable people in unusual situations, written in the smoothly entertaining style which characterized all of Taine's novels. No wonder Analog magazine (then Astounding) hailed the 1st edition of Seeds of Life as "top notch Taine" & praised the author for his "unique, memorable science mysteries, full of outrageously daring flights of the scientific imagination." Analog critic P. SchuylerMiller wrote that "As in most of his books the theme is biological—the sources of life, & of the forces which mold life. An accident remakes the blundering alcoholic technician Neils Bork, into the mutant superman, Miguel de Soto, & at the same time sets in motion other processes which attract the attention of Bork's employer, Andrew Crane, & the competent Dr Brown. "the author keeps several mysteries at the boiling point—what has happened to Bork, to the black widow spider, to Bertha the hen; what's the theory of evolution & devolution around which the whole book is built." John Taine (1883-1960) was Eric Temple Bell, Mathematics professor at the California Inst. of Technology. His sf novels were based on cutting edge science & experiments he learned 1st-hand from his the top scientists of his day. As Taine he was the author The Forbidden Garden, The Greatest Adventure, The Time Stream, The Iron Star & other Golden Age sf classics.