Not everything you need to know to get into med school, but enough to inspire appreciation of the wisdom of the body and...
A short primer on human physiology by Widmaier, who previously explained Why Geese Don’t Get Obese (and We Do) (not reviewed).
If you think of physiology as the medical science of how living organisms work, Widmaier (Biology/Boston Univ.) offers the Popular Mechanics version. To be sure, there is an obligatory chapter on the blueprints (DNA stuff), but the real purpose here is to reveal how we get energy from food (digestion), how oxygen moves from lungs to blood to cells (respiration, circulation, metabolism), how muscles work (locomotion), and what those master molecules (hormones, immunoglobulins, neurotransmitters) are all about. Some elementary chemistry comes into play as the author explains energy transformations, which involve the making and breaking of chemical bonds and the storage of energy in cells in the form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), then sketches the special qualities and quantity of water we carry in blood, inside cells, and the spaces around cells. Having established this background information, Widmaier goes on to describe a variety of molecules and their receptors on cells that enable us to get on with our ordinary lives as well as respond to emergencies. For example, if you are bleeding from a severe injury, blood-pressure sensors in arteries alert the brain to signal the kidney to release renin. This hormone seeks out and converts an inert molecule in the blood to angiotensin, which powerfully triggers muscles in arterial walls to contract to raise blood pressure—and possibly save your life. Widmaier also points to the economy of nature in using single-parent molecules for multiple purposes. The much-maligned cholesterol is actually an essential ingredient of cell membranes, a contributor to bile salts, and the backbone molecule for the manufacture of cortisol and sex hormones.
Not everything you need to know to get into med school, but enough to inspire appreciation of the wisdom of the body and perhaps lead a student to want to learn more.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2002
ISBN: 0-8050-7173-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Loads of good explaining, with reminders, time and again, of how much remains unknown, neatly putting the death of science...
Bryson (I'm a Stranger Here Myself, 1999, etc.), a man who knows how to track down an explanation and make it confess, asks the hard questions of science—e.g., how did things get to be the way they are?—and, when possible, provides answers.
As he once went about making English intelligible, Bryson now attempts the same with the great moments of science, both the ideas themselves and their genesis, to resounding success. Piqued by his own ignorance on these matters, he’s egged on even more so by the people who’ve figured out—or think they’ve figured out—such things as what is in the center of the Earth. So he goes exploring, in the library and in company with scientists at work today, to get a grip on a range of topics from subatomic particles to cosmology. The aim is to deliver reports on these subjects in terms anyone can understand, and for the most part, it works. The most difficult is the nonintuitive material—time as part of space, say, or proteins inventing themselves spontaneously, without direction—and the quantum leaps unusual minds have made: as J.B.S. Haldane once put it, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.” Mostly, though, Bryson renders clear the evolution of continental drift, atomic structure, singularity, the extinction of the dinosaur, and a mighty host of other subjects in self-contained chapters that can be taken at a bite, rather than read wholesale. He delivers the human-interest angle on the scientists, and he keeps the reader laughing and willing to forge ahead, even over their heads: the human body, for instance, harboring enough energy “to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.”
Loads of good explaining, with reminders, time and again, of how much remains unknown, neatly putting the death of science into perspective.Pub Date: May 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-7679-0817-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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