Informative and thoroughly enjoyable science history.
Veteran journalist and author Lax (Woody Allen, 1991, etc.) takes a revealing look back at the time when world-altering science was done on a shoestring, bringing to brilliant life the story of the first great antibiotic.
While Alexander Fleming is the name most often associated with penicillin, it was the Oxford team of Howard Florey, Ernst Chain, and Norman Heatley, the author reminds us, that turned Fleming’s 1928 discovery of the potent mold into a life-saving miracle drug while working under Spartan and dangerous conditions. Responding to the threat of an imminent Nazi invasion, Heatley proposed that in case they were forced to abandon their work and flee, they preserve the mold spores by rubbing some into the fabric of their clothing. (Hence the title.) Lax first captures the personalities of each of these four men and then moves on to Florey’s efforts to scrounge together the funds for his team’s work. An initial grant from the Medical Research Council for materials was £25, the equivalent then of about $100. Funds from the Rockefeller Foundation were more generous, but ingenuity and improvisation remained essential. Heatley cobbled together an apparatus to extract penicillin from mold juice using glass tubing, assorted pumps, copper coils, colored warning lights, and even an old doorbell. The meager amounts of penicillin the team was able to produce showed therapeutic potential, but larger quantities were needed to run the necessary clinical trials. Unable to interest British pharmaceutical companies, they turned to the US, offering to share all their knowledge of how to produce penicillin in return for a supply. Florey and Heatley’s dog-and-pony show in the US, the American role in the penicillin story, Fleming’s public behavior when the news of penicillin’s clinical value became known, the Nobel Prize expectations of those involved all make for fascinating reading. Even sex rears its intriguing head, with both Florey’s wife and mistress getting into the act.
Informative and thoroughly enjoyable science history.Pub Date: April 12, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-6790-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
Ackerman writes with a light but assured touch, her prose rich in fact but economical in delivering it. Fans of birds in all...
Science writer Ackerman (Ah-Choo!: The Uncommon Life of Your Common Cold, 2010, etc.) looks at the new science surrounding avian intelligence.
The takeaway: calling someone a birdbrain is a compliment. And in any event, as Ackerman observes early on, “intelligence is a slippery concept, even in our own species, tricky to define and tricky to measure.” Is a bird that uses a rock to break open a clamshell the mental equivalent of a tool-using primate? Perhaps that’s the wrong question, for birds are so unlike humans that “it’s difficult for us to fully appreciate their mental capabilities,” given that they’re really just small, feathered dinosaurs who inhabit a wholly different world from our once-arboreal and now terrestrial one. Crows and other corvids have gotten all the good publicity related to bird intelligence in recent years, but Ackerman, who does allow that some birds are brighter than others, points favorably to the much-despised pigeon as an animal that “can remember hundreds of different objects for long periods of time, discriminate between different painting styles, and figure out where it’s going, even when displaced from familiar territory by hundreds of miles.” Not bad for a critter best known for bespattering statues in public parks. Ackerman travels far afield to places such as Barbados and New Caledonia to study such matters as memory, communication, and decision-making, the last largely based on visual cues—though, as she notes, birds also draw ably on other senses, including smell, which in turn opens up insight onto “a weird evolutionary paradox that scientists have puzzled over for more than a decade”—a matter of the geometry of, yes, the bird brain.
Ackerman writes with a light but assured touch, her prose rich in fact but economical in delivering it. Fans of birds in all their diversity will want to read this one.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59420-521-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
A magnificent account of a central reality of our times, incorporating deep scientific expertise, broad political and social knowledge, and ethical insight, and Idled with beautifully written biographical sketches of the men and women who created nuclear physics. Rhodes describes in detail the great scientific achievements that led up to the invention of the atomic bomb. Everything of importance is examined, from the discovery of the atomic nucleus and of nuclear fission to the emergence of quantum physics, the invention of the mass-spectroscope and of the cyclotron, the creation of such man-made elements as plutonium and tritium, and implementation of the nuclear chain reaction in uranium. Even more important, Rhodes shows how these achievements were thrust into the arms of the state, which culminated in the unfolding of the nuclear arms race. Often brilliantly, he records the rise of fascism and of anti-Semitism, and the intensification of nationalist ambitions. He traces the outbreak of WW II, which provoked a hysterical rivalry among nations to devise the bomb. This book contains a grim description of Japanese resistance, and of the horrible psychological numbing that caused an unparalleled tolerance for human suffering and destruction. Rhodes depicts the Faustian scale of the Manhattan Project. His account of the dropping of the bomb itself, and of the awful firebombing that prepared its way, is unforgettable. Although Rhodes' gallery of names and events is sometimes dizzying, his scientific discussions often daunting, he has written a book of great drama and sweep. A superb accomplishment.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1986
ISBN: 0684813785
Page Count: 932
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1986
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