Science, Medicine & Inventions:

Challenging Nature: The Clash of Science and Spirituality at the New Frontiers of Life by Lee M. Silver

Biotechnology is the oldest and most widespread of inventions, providing sustenance for humankind since the beginning of civilization. Until recently, however, its tools were crude and its implementation was opaque. Today new understanding in the life sciences brings both precision and transparency to the process. Modern inventions could alleviate human suffering, feed the world, and, at the same time, stem the tide of earth's ecological degradation. Yet ironically, biotechnology becomes evermore contentious. On the left, New Age secularists rail against genetically modified crops. On the right, religious Americans want embryo stem-cell research to be a felony. While they share seemingly little beyond mutual contempt, Lee M. Silver argues that both political camps are driven - consciously or subconsciously - by a fundamental fear of violating a higher spiritual authority, imagined either as the creator God of the Bible, who rules from above, or a vague Mother Nature goddess here on earth.

In Challenging Nature, Silver offers a provocative look at the collision of science, religion, pseudoscience, and politics. Silver is professor of molecular biology and public affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, and holds a Ph.D. in biophysics from Harvard University. A hands-on scientist who has actually manipulated genes, Silver leaves the laboratory, traveling the globe in what he calls “one scientist's journey from a cloistered community, in which life is assumed to be combinations of complex molecules and information flow between them, to a world of humanity dominated by soul and spirits, and to the intense chaos of Mother Nature at large.”

The result is a fascinating book that could provide a wake-up call for the West, where the economic ramifications of pseudoscience may be enormous: a future in which Asia becomes dominant in biotechnological advances. This book will surely fuel precisely the kind of debate Silver recognizes as essential in a democracy sorting out perplexing scientific possibilities.

http://www.amazon.com/Challenging-Nature-Science-Spirituality-Frontiers/dp/0060582677/ref=sr_1_1/103-5265685-5295040?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196893720&sr=1-1

The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness by Jack El-Hai

This groundbreaking biography takes readers into one of the darkest chapters of American medicine - the desperate attempt to treat the hundreds of thousands of psychiatric patients in need of help during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Before the introduction of effective psychiatric medication in the 1950s, patients often had no choice other than to accept confinement in crowded and horrific asylums, or to submit to dangerous “shock” therapies.

Walter Freeman, a neurologist and psychiatrist believed he saw a way out of this quagmire. At a time when Freudian psychoanalysis and other “talk” therapies were growing ascendant, he advocated a completely different type of treatment - a brain operation intended to reduce the severity of psychotic symptoms. In partnership with neurosurgeon James Watts, Freeman adopted the surgical technique of a little known Portuguese physician, rechristened it lobotomy, and began performing the operation in the United States. Freeman transformed lobotomy into a controversial outpatient procedure, traveled the world performing psychosurgeries, and devoted his life to tracking the recovery of his patients.

Jack El-Hai, a prize winning medical journalist, started his research assuming that Freeman was akin to Josef Mengele. Freeman doesn't come off as a two-dimensional monster, instead he is revealed to be a three-dimensional, deeply and desperately flawed man. A gripping medical thriller, The Lobotomist examines the motivations of a man whose personality combined brilliance with arrogance, compassion with egotism, and determination with stubbornness. The result is an unforgettable portrait of a physician who permanently shaped the lives of his patients, as well as the course of medical history. With The Lobotomist, El-Hai gives his readers a first-class biography and a tutorial in the sober need for professional humility.

http://www.amazon.com/Lobotomist-Maverick-Medical-Genius-Illness/dp/0470098309/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-6903175-7696100?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196894114&sr=1-1

The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization by Brian M. Fagan

Anthropologist Brian Fagan engagingly presents an abundance of geological and archaeological evidence supporting the idea that human civilization has been shaped by significant climate change to a greater extent than previously thought. The Long Summer of the title is the Holocene warming trend of the last 15,000 years, which has coddled humanity throughout recorded history. Fagan uses new scientific information to authoritatively walk readers through the major climatic changes in human history, including droughts that led to the formation of the first cities, rainfall increases connected to the spread of bubonic plague, and volcanic eruptions that triggered disastrous cooling trends. These examples serve to prove without a doubt that humans have been increasingly vulnerable to climate change ever since we left a nomadic lifestyle for an agriculture-based one.

One of Fagan's most compelling examples is his detailed history of the city of Ur, in what is now modern-day Iraq. Once a great city in one of the world's earliest civilizations, it first thrived thanks to abundant rainfall and then suffered even more severely when the Indian Ocean monsoons shifted southward, changing rain patterns. By 2000 B.C. its agricultural economy had collapsed, and today it is an abandoned landscape, an assemblage of decaying shrines in the harshest of deserts. Fagan views this event as pivotal. It was, he writes, "the first time an entire city disintegrated in the face of environmental catastrophe." But not, Fagan notes, the last.

Fagan doesn't offer easy solutions, but he presents a compelling history of climate's role in the background-- and sometimes foreground--of human history. Part cautionary tale and part historical detective story, The Long Summer encourages readers to appreciate the increasingly clear links between great weather changes and human society, politics and survival.

http://www.amazon.com/Long-Summer-Climate-Changed-Civilization/dp/0465022820/ref=ed_oe_p/102-9208609-7711348

The Mold in Dr. Florey's Coat: The Story of the Penicillin Miracle by Eric Lax

The discovery of penicillin in 1928 ushered in a new age in medicine. But it took a team of Oxford scientists head­ed by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain four more years to develop it as the first antibiotic, and the most important family of drugs in the twentieth century. At once the world was transformed-major bacterial scourges such as blood poisoning and pneumonia, scarlet fever and diphtheria, gonorrhea syphilis were defeated as penicillin to foster not only a medical revolution but a sexual one as well.

In his wonderfully engaging book, acclaimed author Eric Lax tells the real story behind the discovery and why it took so long to develop the drug. He reveals the reasons why credit for penicillin was misplaced, and why this astonishing achievement garnered a Nobel Prize but no financial rewards for Alexander Fleming, Florey, and his team. In this fluent. entertaining report on the history of the arguably most significant medical discovery of the twentieth century, Lax delves into the lives of the colorful scientists who played significant roles in developing the antibiotic. This is a dramatic story of the men and women who collaborated, sometimes happily but at other times grudgingly, to develop something that proved revolutionary to modern medicine and to the pharmaceutical industry.

The Mold In Dr. Florey’s Coat is the compelling story of the passage of medicine from one era to the next and of the eccentric individuals whose participation in this extraordinary accomplishment has, until now, remained largely unknown. This is the untold story of the discovery of the first wonder drug, the men who led the way, and how it changed the modern world.

http://www.amazon.com/Mold-Dr-Floreys-Coat-Penicillin/dp/0805077782/ref=sr_oe_1_2/002-2453243-9508038?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196894169&sr=1-1

King of Hearts: The True Story of the Maverick Who Pioneered Open Heart Surgery by G. Wayne Miller

The surgeon-as-rock-star mystique seems like it must have come straight out of Hollywood, but the myth had to begin more concretely. A good candidate is Minnesota's Dr. Walt Lillehei, the hard-working, hard­-playing father of open-heart surgery, whose life is told in King of Hearts by journalist G. Wayne Miller.

From his early brilliance, recovery from deadly lymphatic cancer, and dramatic repair of seemingly hopeless heart cases to the disintegration of Lillehei’s career at its peak thanks to an army of personal enemies and conviction on tax evasion counts, his story is consistently surprising and engaging. Fast cars, hard drinking, and plenty of women filled his time when he wasn't turning lives around with a few strokes of his scalpel. The reader will find the surgeon's actions almost unbelievable-rarely endearing, but occasionally saintly. Miller also vividly depicts Lillehei's mentor and ardent supporter Owen Wangensteen, chief surgeon in the University of Minnesota's excellent cardiac program.

Combining this melodramatic biography with the fascinating story of the struggle for open-heart surgery, considered impossible little more than a generation ago, Miller makes a compelling case that the daring scientist was simply another side of the arrogant, absent-minded playboy. No ordinary biography, King of Hearts is breathless reading - you'll find yourself surfacing every few chapters to remind yourself its nonfiction.

http://www.amazon.com/King-Hearts-Maverick-Pioneered-Surgery/dp/0609807242/ref=sr_oe_1_2/104-7272873-8073532?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196894196&sr=1-1

The Last Lone Inventor: A Tale of Genius, Deceit, and the Birth of Television by Evan I. Schwartz

In a story that is both of its time and timeless, Evan I. Schwartz tells a tale of genius and greed, inno­cence and deceit, and corporate arrogance versus independent brilliance. Many men have laid claim to the title "The Father of Television," but Philo T. Farnsworth is the true genius behind what may be the most influential invention of our time. Farnsworth may have ended up a footnote in history, yet he was the first to demonstrate an electronic process for scanning, transmitting, and receiving moving images, a discovery that changed the way we live.

Growing up on a small farm in Idaho, Farnsworth was fascinated by anything scientific, especially, the newest thing on the market - radio. Wouldn't it be even more miraculous to project images along with sound? Driven by his obsession, Farnsworth found a local philanthropist willing to fund his dream. By the age of twenty, in 1926, Farnsworth was operating his own laboratory above a garage in San Francisco and filing his first patent applications. The resulting publicity brought him to the attention of David Sarnoff, the celebrated founder of the NBC radio network, whose own RCA laboratories soon began investigating­ - without much success - a way to transmit a moving image. Determined to control television the way he monopolized the radio - by owning all the royalty-producing patents - Sarnoff, from the lofty heights of his office in a New York skyscraper, devised a plan to steal credit for Farnsworth's designs.

Vividly written, and based on original research, including interviews with surviving members of the Farnsworth family, The Last Lone Inventor is the story of the epic struggle between two equally passionate adversaries and how their clash symbolized a turning point in the culture of creativity. Schwartz's cogent and elegant book persuasively argues Farnsworth's case and describes the heartbreak that defined his life. This is a fascinating inside story of how this eccentric loner invented television and fought corporate America.

http://www.amazon.com/Last-Lone-Inventor-Genius-Television/dp/0060935596/ref=sr_1_1/103-0435504-8558208?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196894229&sr=1-1

Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love by Dave Sobel

The son of a musician, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) tried at first to enter a monastery before engaging the skills that made him the foremost scientist of his day. Though he never left Italy, his inventions and discoveries were heralded around the world. Most sensationally, his telescopes allowed him to reveal a new reality in the heavens and to reinforce the astounding argument that the Earth moves around the Sun. For this belief, he was brought before the Holy Office of the Inquisition, accused of heresy, and forced to spend his last years under house arrest.

Of Galileo's three illegitimate children, the eldest best mirrored his own brilliance, industry, and sensi­bility, and by virtue of these qualities became his confidante. Born Virginia in 1600, she was thirteen when Galileo placed her in a convent near him in Florence, where she took the most appropriate name of Suor Maria Celeste. Her loving support, which Galileo repaid in kind, proved to be her father's greatest source of strength throughout his most productive and tumultuous years. Her presence, through letters which Sobel has translated from their original Italian and woven into the narrative, graces her father's life now as it did then.

Galileo's Daughter dramatically recolors the personality and accomplishment of a mythic figure whose seventeenth-century clash with Catholic doctrine continues to define the schism between science and religion. Moving between Galileo's grand public life and Maria Celeste's sequestered world, Sobel illuminates the Florence of the Medicis and the papal court in Rome during the pivotal era when humanity's perception of its place in the cosmos was being overturned.

http://www.amazon.com/Galileos-Daughter-Historical-Memoir-Science/dp/0140280553/ref=sr_oe_1_2/105-3223872-3730061?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196894306&sr=1-1