Despommier is an excellent popularizer, lacing his accounts of our invaders’ ingenuity with history and anecdotes that...
The ick factor is high—20-foot tapeworms, skin nodules filled with writhing worms, etc.—but for parasitologists, the fellow travelers chronicled in this illuminating book command respect for the artful ways they have managed cohabitation since the dawn of life.
Despommier (Emeritus, Public Health and Microbiology/Columbia Univ.; The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century, 2010, etc.) writes that his prime interests are not short-lived protozoans like the malaria parasite, deadly though it is. What fascinates him are parasites able to survive in a host for years, inflicting slow but inexorable harm. His specialty has been a species of nematode that causes trichinosis. Once the larvae are ingested, they mature, mate, produce new larvae in the gut and then move out to muscle tissue. There, they fashion a “nurse cell,” a fortress that protects the larvae as they grow to the infective stage. Such complex life cycles are typical of parasites and are delineated by Despommier in chapters devoted to hookworm, trypanosomes, lymphatic filariae, tapeworms and other scourges. Some parasites don’t have to be eaten or gain entry through a cut or insect bite; they can sneak in along a hair follicle. Others elude immune capture by secretions that suppress immunity or by changing their surface antigens. Despommier highlights these parasite tricks, and he discusses voluntary infection with whipworms to treat autoimmune disease by quieting an overactive immune system. Yes, the infection helps, but eventually, patients mount an immune response to kill the worms, allowing their autoimmune disease to return—all the more reason to search for the key molecules involved. Sadly, parasitic diseases remain highly prevalent, albeit with an occasional success story.
Despommier is an excellent popularizer, lacing his accounts of our invaders’ ingenuity with history and anecdotes that underscore how grateful a modern society should be for clean drinking water and sanitary facilities.Pub Date: July 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-231-16194-7
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
It may come as a surprise that there are still scientific dissenters from Darwinism, but here's the proof, in a book that calls on biologists to put organisms, not molecules, at the center of the science. Goodwin (Biology/Milton Keynes College, England) begins with the proposition that specifying the chemical composition of a substance tells us nothing about its form: graphite, diamonds, and fullerenes all consist of pure carbon but differ radically in shape. Similarly, where many biologists assume that the makeup of an organism's DNA tells them all they need to know about it, Goodwin brings to the table the disciplines of physics and mathematics. He applies the insights of chaos theory to the activity of an ant's nest and to children's play, to the growth of slime molds and algae, and to fibrillation in the human heart. An older mathematical discovery, the Fibonacci series (in which each new number is the sum of its two immediate predecessors), appears to play a role in the position of leaves on a branch, as well as in the structure of quadruped limbs. But as important as his specific illustrations of his points is his contention that Darwinism has taken on a rhetoric not dissimilar to the Puritan ethic, with each organism struggling to overcome a harsh world and become fitter. Eventually, he believes, Darwinian natural selection will be seen as part of a larger physical and mathematical structure, in which the entire organism, as opposed to its DNA alone, is seen in context. In the concluding chapter, he cites several biologists who are working toward a comprehensive new biology, in which the rights of organisms and of nature are set against the claims of genetic engineering and other forms of meddling with the environment. An often exciting look at frontiers of biology beyond the well-tilled fields of gene research. (68 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 2, 1994
ISBN: 0-02-544710-6
Page Count: 243
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
A timely, comprehensive, and often interesting argument that the most pressing issue the Middle East faces is not land and borders but rather the supply and distribution of the region's water. A soil scientist with extensive consulting experience throughout the world, Hillel (Plant and Soil Science/Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst; Out of the Earth, 1990) reveals how, in one of the world's most strategic and parched areas, ecological considerations, particularly concerning water supplies, may influence geopolitics as much as summit meetings, police forces, and arms build-ups. Hillel focuses on the region's four great rivers: the Nile, the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the Jordan. He shows how a 1967 dispute between Israel and Syria over water rights was a contributing cause to the Six-Day War; how Iraq and Syria nearly came to blows with Turkey in 1990 over distribution of water from the Euphrates; and how there has been considerable tension between Jordan and Saudi Arabia over an aquifer (a water-bearing layer of permeable rock and a rare geological feature in the arid Middle East) from which both desert kingdoms draw. Hillel also suggests ways that nations can avoid disputes through intercountry and regional agreements, and he proposes various means of increasing water supplies and assuring effective use—e.g., desalination, cloud seeding, drip irrigation, and improved transmission (pipeline leakage wastes fully half the water intended for some Middle Eastern cities). This is an impressively interdisciplinary study that combines insights from geology, archaeology, etymology, biblical and other ancient Near East studies, modern history, soil science, agronomy, ecology, and contemporary political analysis. At times, Hillel floods the reader with highly technical data that will interest only hydrologists or other specialists. Generally, however, this is a clearly written, often colorful, accessible, and useful work of regional studies.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-508068-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
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