Impressive research and good storytelling. (Maps, 16 pages b&w illustrations, not seen)
An absorbing chronicle of two related adventures: the 19th-century hunt by botanical explorers in the Andes for the cinchona tree, whose bark produces quinine, once the only effective treatment for malaria; and the contemporary quest by scientists in the laboratory to find a cure for this deadly disease.
British journalist Honigsbaum focuses on the stories of three men: Richard Spruce, a botanist who spent 15 years in the Amazon and Andes; Charles Ledger, a trader who made numerous expeditions through Peru, Bolivia, and Chile; and Sir Clements Markham, a historian attached to the India Office who coordinated several cinchona-seeking forays to South America in the 1860s. With malaria rampant in India and Africa, the British were desperate to secure a source of quinine. Their plan was to take cinchona seeds from South America and start cinchona plantations in India. Harsh geography, fearsome insects, head-hunting Indians, and political unrest made finding the seeds extraordinarily hazardous, and growing the trees in India posed an unexpectedly complex horticultural challenge. As matters worked out, the best seeds ended up in the hands of Dutch plantation owners in Java, which by 1937 supplied 97% of the world’s quinine. Honigsbaum, who traveled to South America to research the cinchona adventure, devotes most of his text to it, turning to the scientific search for a malaria cure only in the last three chapters. There, after a compressed but informative history, he considers the issues of increasing drug resistance, the resurgence of tropical diseases such as malaria because of global warming, the reluctance of profit-conscious pharmaceutical manufacturers to devote large sums of money to malaria research, and the problems facing the ongoing hunt for a vaccine.
Impressive research and good storytelling. (Maps, 16 pages b&w illustrations, not seen)Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-15469-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Why sex? It's for repair, stupid. Michod (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology/Univ. of Arizona) says that sex is not for diversity in the gene pool (the conventional wisdom), but rather to repair genetic damage and rid the genome of unwanted mutations. Remember all that business you learned in biology about sexual division (meiosis), that complicated process by which chromosomes split various times, then come together at fertilization to produce an offspring with genes from all four grandparents? Well, that certainly makes for diversity, argues Michod, but it's secondary to keeping the gene lineage pure: That chromosome activity can repair damage. In defense of this provocative idea, the author reviews the course of evolution from asexual and sexual reproduction in single cells on to complex organisms, explaining the increasingly sophisticated means by which DNA replication is controlled and mistakes are corrected. Using mathematical models and examples drawn from nature he illustrates the high cost of sex (energy consumed in searching and wooing, chance of disease, etc.) to demonstrate that sex must be doing something vital. That something turns out to be preserving the genome. Shades of Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene, 1977): Sex is not for the pleasure of thee and me, it's just the genes' way not only of making other genes but of making sure those genes are clean. Michod attempts to clarify by way of diagrams and chapter notes that may challenge the general reader, as does his soaring last chapter, in which he argues for both the unity of life and the distinctiveness of species. No doubt many will respond that there must be more to sex than repair, and some will raise the issue of such phenomena as transduction in bacteria and viral infection as ways in which nature mixes genomes for better or worse. But Michod's ideas surely merits a hearing. Sure to spark a lively debate.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-201-40754-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
Some surprising answers to questions about why our bodies are designed the way they are and why we get the diseases we do. Nesse, a physician (Psychiatry/Univ. of Michigan) and Williams (Ecology and Evolution/SUNY, Stony Brook) first teamed up to write an article on Darwinian medicine, which applies the concept of adaptation by natural selection to medical questions. That article, published in 1991 in The Quarterly Review of Biology, has been expanded into the present book, in which the authors look at the design characteristics of the human body that make it susceptible to disease. Their conclusions? First, sometimes it's our genes that make us vulnerable to disease. Some genetic defects arise through mutations, but more often, genes with deleterious effects are maintained through natural selection because their benefits outweigh their costs. Second, there's a mismatch between our present environment and the one that over thousands of years shaped our hunter-gatherer ancestors. There simply hasn't been time for our bodies to adapt, and we suffer the consequences. Third, disease results from design compromises. For example, the structural changes that allowed us to develop from horizontal four-footed creatures to upright two-footed ones left us vulnerable to back problems. Fourth, our evolutionary history has left us some troublesome legacies, such as the unfortunate intersection in our throats of the passages for food and air. Some of the areas Nesse and Williams apply their Darwinian approach to are infectious diseases, allergies, cancer, aging, reproduction, and mental disorders. Happily, they write with impeccable clarity, and when they are speculating (which they do freely), they are careful to say so. They also offer numerous suggestions for research studies, thoughtful proposals for reshaping medical textbooks and medical education, and a scenario dramatizing Darwinian medicine's possible clinical application. Fascinating reading for doctors and patients alike.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8129-2224-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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