Jared Diamond, professor of physiology at the University of California Los Angeles School of Medicine, has won the 1998 Rhõne-Poulenc science book prize for Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Norton/Vintage; for a review see Nature 386, 339; 1997). This makes him the only author to have won the prize twice (his previous success was The Third Chimpanzee). What's more, Guns, Germs and Steel was also awarded this year's Pulitzer prize for general non-fiction (see Nature 392, 750; 1998). Other shortlisted authors for the £10,000 Rhõne-Poulenc prize, which was announced last week at the Science Museum in London, were David Deutsch (The Fabric of Reality; Allen Lane, 1997), Richard Fortey (Life; Knopf), Ernst Mayr (This Is Biology; Belknap, 1997) and Simon Singh (Fermat's Last Theorem; Walker, 1997).