BOOK REVIEW: NOVEL : It’s a Winning Formula: Real People and Interesting Plot : THE BOURBAKI GAMBIT <i> by Carl Djerassi</i> , The University of Georgia Press, $19.95, 230 pages

During two decades in the newspaper dodge, I spent part of the time covering politicians and part of the time covering scientists. I liked the scientists better.

To be sure, scientists are human beings, subject to all of the foibles that afflict the rest of us. But at least they are trying to add to the world’s knowledge. Politicians, on the other hand, try to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes.

With a few notable exceptions, scientists and people who write about science focus overwhelmingly on the knowledge part and give short shrift to the human foibles.

Carl Djerassi is an eminent scientist, professor of chemistry at Stanford University and “father of the Pill,” which was a key element--perhaps the key element--in the sexual revolution that got going in the 1960s. In recent years he has turned to writing fiction, and he has now produced his second novel, “The Bourbaki Gambit,” a story about scientists and what really motivates them.

Scientists, it turns out, want to be stars just like everyone else. Yes, they want to add to the world’s knowledge, but they want credit for their discoveries. They want their name in lights, preferably above the title. More than anything else, they want to win a Nobel Prize.

So Djerassi sets out to explore whether top-notch scientists can work anonymously. His narrator and lead character is Max Weiss, a distinguished biochemist at Princeton, winner of many accolades and prizes (not the Nobel), who has been unceremoniously forced to take early retirement after 34 years on the faculty.

He has been stripped of his endowed chair and his comfortable office and has been granted an unpaid, one-year position as a “senior research biochemist” in a letter from the university trustees that began, “Dear Sir”--”not Dear Professor Weiss or even Dear Weiss,” he grimly notes. “My 34 years at Princeton--27 of them as Donohue Professor of Biochemistry--apparently counted for nothing.”

Universities, like other institutions, are merciless, particularly in their desire to get rid of the old and replace them with the young. This is another of Djerassi’s themes.

Max Weiss wants to show the trustees and the world that many fine tunes have been played on old violins. He also wants to see whether scientists can do good work without personal credit.

So he conceives a plan to assemble a group of newly retired biochemists and have them work together and publish under an assumed name, just as a group of French mathematicians actually did in the 1930s, when they created “Nicolas Bourbaki,” who has been publishing mathematics since. Hence the title of the book.

Weiss is assisted, prodded and financed in this endeavor by Diana Doyle-Ditmus, a woman older than he whom he meets on a beach in the Caribbean and who, it turns out, has a Ph.D. in French history, is a former dean at New York University and has recently received a MacArthur “genius” award to boot. She also knows how to live well and is full of life, giving instruction to Weiss in these matters along the way.

The other participants in Weiss’ Bourbaki group are a Japanese biochemist whose interests have turned to poetry, an Austrian scientist whose son is a Jungian psychoanalyst, and a lesbian mathematical biophysicist from the University of Chicago. The role of women in science is another of Djerassi’s themes.

As luck would have it, the Austrian comes up with a spectacularly good idea (so spectacular that in real life, the scientist who actually came up with it did win a Nobel Prize). I won’t give away what happens to the group’s one-for-all-and-all-for-one plans.

In a preface to the novel, Djerassi tells us that his work is not science fiction but “science-in-fiction,” a new, interesting and useful genre. He has ideas about science and scientists, which he has chosen to spell out in fiction, thereby making those ideas more accessible to non-scientists.

If Djerassi had written an essay about the injustices (real and imagined) of university early-retirement plans, his readership would have been limited to the Chronicle of Higher Education. If he had written an essay about scientists’ need for recognition or about how difficult it is for women to crack into the mostly male world of science, his readership would have been similarly small.

But by addressing these themes in fiction, he has written a book about people, a subject that interests nearly everyone. Moreover, he has avoided the pitfall of turning his characters into two-dimensional caricatures. Even if they are not drawn as fully and deeply as, say, Dostoevsky might have done, the characters in Djerassi’s book are nonetheless real, believable people. Their dialogue is a little stilted at times, but, after all, they are scientists.

Near the end of the book, Diana says to Max, “I found it fascinating to watch you four: You never bored me, and I learned a great deal.”

A reader might say the same.