A portrait that captures not only the man, but also the end-of-the-19th-century dynamism that fostered revolutions in art,...
A resurrection of the life of “one of the founding fathers of immunology,” Elie Metchnikoff (1845-1916).
Vikhanski (In Search of the Lost Cord: Solving the Mystery of Spinal Cord Regeneration, 2001, etc.), a Russian-born, Israel-based science journalist, was initially dismissive of the achievements of the Ukrainian-born scientist, depicted as a great Russian hero in her school texts, a depiction she thought was merely Soviet propaganda. What she discovered sheds light on a critical period in medical and cultural history. Germ theory advanced greatly under Louis Pasteur in France and Robert Koch in Germany, and vaccines and serum treatments were developed to prevent or cure disease. Yet next to nothing was known about the body’s natural defenses. Enter Metchnikoff, a zoologist and fervent Darwinian who believed the study of simple organisms could reveal protective mechanisms that would be preserved in higher forms of life. His great epiphany occurred when he used rose thorns to invade the body of a transparent marine organism and, under the microscope, saw the mobilization of cells that engulfed and chewed up the thorns. He called them phagocytes (cell-eaters) and declared them the body’s chief defenders. Meanwhile, scientists in Germany had discovered antibodies. The resulting “Immunity War” pitted French scientists at the Pasteur Institute (where Metchnikoff settled for the remainder of his career) against the Germans. Eventually, the war waned, and Metchnikoff and Paul Ehrlich were jointly awarded a Nobel Prize. Only much later did scientists realize that Metchnikoff’s phagocytes reflected “innate immunity,” an evolutionarily older defense system compared to the “adaptive immunity” represented by antibodies. Metchnikoff went on to develop theories of aging and ideas about gut microbes that spawned a global yogurt revolution. As Vikhanski richly illustrates, Metchnikoff did everything with passion, in both his professional and personal lives.
A portrait that captures not only the man, but also the end-of-the-19th-century dynamism that fostered revolutions in art, politics, and science.Pub Date: April 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61373-110-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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