In a small lecture room at the University of Pennsylvania about 10 years ago, immunologist Polly Matzinger stepped before a gathering of science writers and began her presentation on the human immune system. Within seconds the overhead projector failed.

After fussing with the machine, a frustrated Matzinger pulled a blackboard to center stage and announced that she would give her lecture the old fashioned way. She picked up a piece of chalk and for the next two hours talked and diagramed her way through one of the most enthralling science lectures the writers had ever heard.

A couple of years before that, Harvard astronomer Robert Kirshner arrived at a class wearing a miner's hat, complete with a headlamp on the front. As the lights in the big lecture hall dimmed, Kirshner switched on the headlamp and stepped onto a small, rotating platform. "Today's topic," he said as the thin beam of light from his hat swept around the dark room, "is pulsars."

Both Matzinger and Kirshner appear in a new book, Bold Science: Seven Scientists Who Are Changing Our World, by Ted Anton. Matzinger is one of Anton's magnificent seven, while Kirshner is cast as an adversary to another of the heroes. Unfortunately, and for reasons that are a little difficult to define, neither Matzinger nor Kirshner come off as interesting in the book as they are in real life.

Anton profiles seven researchers whom he believes blend unusual amounts of creativity, independent thought, and determination to change, even redefine, their fields of science. "Their scrappy creative approach results partly from a new fusion of unrelated fields, with professionals and amateurs collaborating around the world instantly, much as the Renaissance grew from Europe's discovery of travel, of Arabic, Oriental, and classical knowledge, and from the breakdown of social hierarchy," he writes in his introduction.

Anton's selected scientists come from "fields in the midst of change, on the verge, possibly, of a new way of understanding the world." The author wants to present "a kind of comparative biography or narrative in a grand search for the keys to today's creativity." His scientists, in addition to Matzinger, are Craig Venter, Susan Greenfield, Geoffrey Marcy, Saul Perlmutter, Gretchen Daily, and Carl Woese.

The book opens with a 24-page profile of gene hunter Craig Venter that begins in a smelly Quonset hut-hospital in Vietnam, and ends with the remarkable success of Venter's company, Celera Genomics. After Vietnam, Venter attended a community college with the idea of becoming a doctor in the Third World, Anton writes. But Venter had seen "villages bombed, children orphaned and thousands of young men die. Gradually, the idea of becoming a doctor came to be no longer enough. 'What,' he was asking himself, 'is the mechanism of life in the first place?'"

The profile then goes on to discuss how Venter overcame "almost impossible odds," and quotes the researcher as saying he started his education from scratch. "Things were not handed to me on a silver platter," Venter says. Well, fine, Venter got a late start on science and it wasn't easy. And as he charged forward in his field, he predictably alienated a few scientists, developed some critics who, for the most part, seem petty, and through grit and determination was successful in the end. Venter now races a yacht whose largest sail he has decorated with a large drawing of himself in a wizard outfit. (We're told that twice in a couple of pages.)

In the end, I'm not sure if I like Venter, but that really isn't important. A greater source of frustration is that this profile is a superficial sketch. Anton interviewed a lot of people, but the information he presents isn't terribly revealing or thought provoking.

That is the problem, to varying degrees, with the entire book. Some of the profiles read better than others. Astronomer Geoffrey Marcy's profile reads as though Anton made a deeper connection with Marcy's quest to find planets around other stars. The writing in that profile has an energy and intensity that pulls in the reader - qualities that are lacking in most of the sketches.

Adding to the feeling that Bold Science was rushed to publication are the copy editing errors - five obvious mistakes, including dropped and misspelled words, in a 178 page book.

The message of the book is that science is changing, with seemingly disparate fields having relevance to one another, and that the new cutting-edge scientist is the one who can make the connections between the odd pieces. "We live in the age of interactive, interconnected synthesizers," Anton says in his conclusion.

Finally, he ends by talking about how these new scientists are clever, fast-moving, and adaptable, having the traits necessary to proceed when science is in "as dark a time as ours is." And he leaves you there, reaching for your flashlight and wondering exactly what it is he is talking about.