I usually write lengthier reviews, but I am not a subject-matter expert in immunology. Thus, I do not believe I am qualified to write a critical review of this work. Generally, the authors are skeptical about the current path of HIV vaccine development, and they propose a new direction. I am a member of a community advisory board for an HIV vaccine trial – an activity that led me to read this work. It is…
Understanding the origins of AIDS is important for at least three reasons. First, HIV/AIDS is an important biomedical global disease that is still not conquered. Second, much cultural rhetoric due to stigma exists in society about this disease, and blame for the AIDS pandemic have been wrongfully placed at the feet of many oppressed groups. Third, contemporary events with coronavirus have shown that humans aren’t as safe from disease and pandemic as we might imagine,…
“The universe of these beings is finite and yet has no limits.” – Albert Einstein, in chapter XXXI So says one of the great thinkers – perhaps, the great thinker – of the twentieth century in explaining his general theory of relativity. While there was much mathematical in its derivation, Einstein explains it in common language to the educated reader in this short work. He also explains the special theory of relativity here. While such…
Though a fan of science in its many forms, I am much more familiar with the early days of Christian Biblical history than with scientific history of the human species. I have studied it, but the ground seems to be slowly shifting in this realm. Böhme details these shifts in this work as he summarizes the evidence over the last 20-30 years. She does so through a lucid, suspenseful, and engaging manner. She questions many…
The surgery of organ transplantation has taken off in the past fifty years. However, the ability to apply these gains to the nervous system has lagged behind due to the limitations of nerve regeneration. As told in this book, during this time, Robert White, MD/PhD, sought to pioneer head transplantation onto a new body. He was successful in transplanting a monkey’s head onto another’s body. However, he retired and died before his dream could come…
This book, over a decade old, tells the history of one of London’s worst cholera epidemics. It also tells of how John Snow and Henry Whitehead found the cause for the epidemic and transformed how cities managed cholera epidemics and epidemics in general. Knowledge, reason, and data triumphed over ignorance. In his telling, Johnson describes a variety of topics in depth – a telling that informs and inspires modern readers. During the early Victorian era,…
Issues exposing unconscious bias have gripped my home country, the United States of America. Books like this help us address these issues in quiet pages before they escalate onto the street. Williams collects interviews from a diverse group of people in the workplace. Together, these can serve as ways for workers to understand their colleagues nearby. She groups these interviews into five parts: Race, women, LGBTQ+, age and ability, and religion and culture. The latter…
An outsider’s view of scientific history deems that stories of scientific discovery are boring. After all, how could readers be interested in narratives about how people work in laboratories? To that, Henig pens her eloquent reply in an interesting tale of how an obscure monk in Eastern Europe transformed modern biology… after he died. Thus goes the all-too-human tale of humble Gregor Mendel. After joining a monastic order in the 1800s, Mendel studied science and…
Paradigm shifts happen in science occasionally, but historically, relatively few professionals make the shift. Usually, new generations of practitioners tend to bring in the change via their educational experiences. This is unfortunate. In this work, Smith and Gomez educate healthcare professionals and the reading public about advances in medical research. They attempt to enlighten us all about what is going to happen next in doctor’s offices. Their focus is on multiple developments around the cell.…
Upon reading the title of this book, many non-specialists might rightly ask, “What is bioinformatics? And why does it deserve its own history?” For the first question, bioinformatics is the application of computer technology to biological studies, and I hope that reading this review will answer the second question. Many of us were taught hypothesis-driven biology in school – that is, we were taught to ask a well-formed question, perform an experiment, and confirm/deny the…