A good mix of the personal and the professional in a memoir suggesting that C.P. Snow’s two cultures occasionally meet...
Nobel Prize–winning biologist Varmus describes a varied, idiosyncratic career.
Medicine seemed an obvious career choice for the son of a physician, but he also loved literature; Amherst allowed him to do pre-med but also enjoy gifted English professors. After a restless year in Harvard’s graduate English department, he switched to medical school at Columbia. To avoid serving in the Vietnam War, which he strongly opposed, he applied for alternative duties at the National Institutes of Health. He worked in a lab that exposed him to virology and molecular hybridization, areas that proved crucial in his later studies of cancer genes. In short, fortuitous events, serendipity and sheer intellectual curiosity led to Varmus partnering with Michael Bishop (his co-Nobelist) at the University of California, San Francisco and their discovery that human cells contain proto-oncogenes, bits of DNA that if mutated can trigger malignancy. Details of the experiments with tumor viruses that led to their discoveries comprise the second of the memoir’s four parts. President Clinton appointed Varmus director of NIH in the mid-’90s, a time of growth for the federal research agency that nonetheless had its testy moments. The author was and is an outspoken lab scientist. He contended with turf battles among NIH institutes and sought greater control over NIH funding. He had to deal with issues such as embryonic stem cell research and reproductive cloning, as well as congressional oversight hearings, pressures to create new institutes and the demands of patient-advocacy groups. There were good times, of course, but after six years Varmus was ready to move on to a new job as president of New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He has not endeared himself to science publishers by being an ardent advocate for free access to medical literature via the Internet, helping to launch a series of Public Library of Science journals available to anyone with a browser.
A good mix of the personal and the professional in a memoir suggesting that C.P. Snow’s two cultures occasionally meet within the same individual.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-06128-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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