A fascinating discourse on how medical science is zeroing in on an HIV vaccine after several anomalous triumphs.
With the AIDS epidemic now in its fourth decade, award-winning HIV research scientist Holt believes “we are only just beginning to understand our shared evolution with viruses.” Still, she offers increasing hope for a cure by spotlighting the two male “Berlin Patients” and several others, including a child, who chemically bombarded and expunged the HIV virus from their bodies. The author tracks the enduring histories of these men—German-born Christian Hahn and Timothy Brown, an American—from the detection of their initial viral prodromes to the astonishing depletion of HIV-infected cells from their bodies, prompting clinical trials and controversial research. Holt also profiles HIV specialists Heiko Jessen, Bruce Walker and David Ho as part of a frustrated yet galvanized group of professionals working toward developing new therapies to either counterbalance HIV’s onslaught on a vulnerable immune system or, ideally, discover a way to have the virus coexist with its human host. The author includes research that field experts consider “pertinent and exciting,” and the result makes for educative, thought-provoking and frequently alarming reading. Textbook descriptions on the intricacies of HIV’s tactical viral transmission commingle with a timeline spanning from an era when a seropositive test result equaled a sure death sentence. The author also examines controversial trials of AZT drug therapies, stem cell transplants, and the genetic suppression and inexplicable eradication of the virus from a fortunate few. Holt further supports her subject with graphic illustrations and a well-balanced assortment of interviews and opinions from doctors, genetic scientists and informed researchers, all unified in the global battle to find a cure.
An astute AIDS retrospective blended with contemporary updates on aggressive medical strategies.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-525-95392-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
Categories: HEALTH & FITNESS | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HEALTH & FITNESS
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A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | HEALTH & FITNESS | SPORTS & RECREATION
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