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THE SECRET BODY

HOW THE NEW SCIENCE OF THE HUMAN BODY IS CHANGING THE WAY WE LIVE

Dazzling discoveries in expert hands.

An exciting update on human biology in the years since the initial description of the double helix structure of DNA in 1953.

This is not a subject that popular writers have ignored, but Davis, a professor of immunology, refreshingly avoids the low-hanging fruit (life extension, designer babies) and digs into the actual science. While acknowledging the many miracles this new science will lead to (most of which will not occur in the immediate future), the author explores what contemporary scientists have learned and how they learned it. Davis emphasizes that many breakthroughs followed the development of new technology. For centuries, scientists could only examine living cells through the familiar light microscope, the magnification of which reached a limit in the 1870s before breakthroughs in the 20th century vastly increased its power. Years of work determined the structure of a single protein, insulin, and won Frederick Sanger a Nobel Prize in 1958. Today, machines do this in minutes. “It once took years and hundreds of millions of dollars to sequence a human genome,” writes Davis. “Now it takes a few hundred dollars, or less, and can be done in a single day.” The tedious process of counting and identifying living cells became much smoother with the invention of the flow cytometer. It’s easy to understand how the heart or kidney works by watching it in action but not the brain. Enter optogenetics, by which a genetically altered neuron fires when exposed to light. Following its tortuous path became easier with another advance that allowed scientists to give a cell a bright color without killing it. Davis, who writes accessibly and concisely, also examines a fairly new fascination, the gut: “There’s scarcely any state of human health or disease that hasn’t been linked with the [microbiome]. Variations have been associated with diseases as diverse as autism, asthma, multiple sclerosis, cancer and inflammatory bowel disease.” Further current research is revealing new ways that we can manipulate our resident bacteria for our benefit.

Dazzling discoveries in expert hands.

Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-691-21058-2

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Princeton Univ.

Review Posted Online: June 21, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021

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ELON MUSK

Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.

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A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.

To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.

Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.

Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023

ISBN: 9781982181284

Page Count: 688

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023

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THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS

Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...

A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.

In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.

Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.

Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010

ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010

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