THE INTERLEUKIN REVOLUTION

Smith looks back on his efforts to elucidate the immune system before his rivals beat him to it in this candid memoir.

The author recaps his career, from medical school through a two-decade stint as a medical professor at Dartmouth in the 1970s and 1980s, in which he made pioneering contributions to immunology. The book dives deep into his research on T cells—immune cells that destroy pathogens and provide long-term immunity—and the role of interleukin-2, a protein that promotes T-cell growth. Smith’s narrative features scenes of exhilarating discovery in which experiments worked beautifully and he gradually conceived a vision of interleukins as a set of hormones meticulously regulating the immune system. He twines these with an intimate portrait of cut-throat scientific competition: He recounts how he battled a hidebound immunological establishment, chewed out a journal editor for rejecting a paper, finessed the National Institutes of Health when it dragged its feet renewing his grant, and was backstabbed by a graduate student who stole a cell line his lab developed and sold it for $5,000 to a Japanese company that used it to publish an important finding just before he did (“In science, the only way to maintain one’s sanity and to stay in the game is to always look forward,” he concludes). Smith’s exposition is thorough and comprehensive, and readers see his work develop chronologically, from rudimentary hypotheses and experimentation on mysterious substances to a detailed understanding of molecules and mechanisms. The writing is sophisticated enough for scientists but sufficiently clear and straightforward for interested laypeople to follow, and the author describes lab work in down-to-earth prose that’s full of vivid detail: “I would walk over to the hospital…don my scrubs, and go into the operating room, where the surgeon would drop a tonsil into my cup of saline. Back in the lab…we would slice up the tonsil with a scalpel and forceps, releasing the individual lymphocytes.” The result is a gripping saga of science as a fraught and very human pursuit.

A fascinating look at a life in science, full of “eureka” moments and convoluted power plays.