A meticulous account of slippery science that develops slowly into a panoramic view of the biomedical world.
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Crewdson (The Tarnished Door: The New Immigrants and the Transformation of America, not reviewed) relates a cautionary tale of the American doctor who lied repeatedly to take credit for discovering the AIDS virus.
His story begins in the early 1980s when American men, Haitians, and Africans were dying of a mysterious disease. Luc Montagnier and his staff at the Pasteur Institute isolated LAV (Lymphadenopathy Associated Virus) from a pre-AIDS patient. Bob Gallo at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, believed the Human T-Cell Virus (HTLV) was the culprit. Both sides exchanged samples and claimed victory at medical conferences and in science magazines. In October 1983, the NCI's Mika Popovic performed an experiment that revealed the French were correct. The cause of AIDS was LAV, later shown to be a chimpanzee virus that spread to humans probably in the 1940s. Gallo buried Popovic's work; his French-provided sample of LAV “accidentally” became HTLV-3B, which he subsequently claimed to have had first. Gallo’s reputation and forcefulness convinced many in the scientific community, and so, despite Pasteur's earlier application, the National Patent Office granted him the first patent for an AIDS test kit. The kits, which failed to sense a crucial AIDS protein, were a disaster. False positive readings led women to abort healthy pregnancies: a false negative permitted an AIDS patient’s organs to be transplanted to seven healthy recipients. The second half covers the legal disputes and bureaucratic reviews of Gallo's procedures. A partial list of the extensive dramatis personae includes members of the Centers for Disease Control, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Red Cross and its French equivalent, editors of a half dozen science magazines, Abbott Labs and competing test kit makers, Congressman John Dingall (D/Michigan) and organizers of medical conferences around the world. Throughout, Crewdson's prose, with a minimum of esoteric passages, successfully clarifies the scientific material.
A meticulous account of slippery science that develops slowly into a panoramic view of the biomedical world.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2002
ISBN: 0-316-13476-7
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
A media-savvy scientist cleans out his desk.
Tyson (Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, 2017, etc.) receives a great deal of mail, and this slim volume collects his responses and other scraps of writing.
The prolific science commentator and bestselling author, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History, delivers few surprises and much admirable commentary. Readers may suspect that most of these letters date from the author’s earlier years when, a newly minted celebrity, he still thrilled that many of his audience were pouring out their hearts. Consequently, unlike more hardened colleagues, he sought to address their concerns. As years passed, suspecting that many had no interest in tapping his expertise or entering into an intelligent give and take, he undoubtedly made greater use of the waste basket. Tyson eschews pure fan letters, but many of these selections are full of compliments as a prelude to asking advice, pointing out mistakes, proclaiming opposing beliefs, or denouncing him. Readers will also encounter some earnest op-ed pieces and his eyewitness account of 9/11. “I consider myself emotionally strong,” he writes. “What I bore witness to, however, was especially upsetting, with indelible images of horror that will not soon leave my mind.” To crackpots, he gently repeats facts that almost everyone except crackpots accept. Those who have seen ghosts, dead relatives, and Bigfoot learn that eyewitness accounts are often unreliable. Tyson points out that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so confirmation that a light in the sky represents an alien spacecraft requires more than a photograph. Again and again he defends “science,” and his criteria—observation, repeatable experiments, honest discourse, peer review—are not controversial but will remain easy for zealots to dismiss. Among the instances of “hate mail” and “science deniers,” the author also discusses philosophy, parenting, and schooling.
A media-savvy scientist cleans out his desk.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-324-00331-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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