2 comments about Slide Rule: The Autobiography of an Engineer.

1. I read all of Nevil Shute's books, except this autobiography, at a much earlier time. I've periodically searched for this book for the last twenty years, and now I'm so glad to have read it. It helps to explain why I enjoyed the man's novels so much.

   I was aware that Mr. Shute worked in aeronautical engineering, but had no idea he played such an important role in the industry. I had pictured his early engineering work much like his character in "No Highway in the Sky", a task oriented almost 'nerd-like' man with no interest beyond the laboratory. In an age when people seem to do all possible to elevate their public persona it is refreshing to look at a man who possessed humility.

   I realize now how Mr. Shute could develop such wonderful characters in his novels, people with a full range of foibles but also the quiet courage that perserveres through struggles. He had his own life and his own dignity to build upon.




2. The detailed account of the design and transatlantic flight of the dirigible R-100 is the most fascinating part of this book. The description of the pre-computer work of a large roomfull of engineers calculating and recalculating the stresses (iterative calculation) on the framework of the airship is amazing.

5 comments about The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug.

1. Some dolt on a bicycle slammed into me yesterday. Fortunately I did not break any bones, but the bruises are giving me an uncomfortable time since then. After rinsing both knees with chlorhexidine and iodine, I was not concerned; if there was an infection, antibiotics would take care of it.
   
   But it wouldn't have been that way seventy years ago, when the most you could do to prevent a wound from getting infected...was wait, and perhaps apply some crude remedies. That was how it had been for two hundred years. For all the progress we had made, bad bugs still mostly got the better of us. It is appalling that about fifty percent of deaths in WW1 were from infections that riddled shrapnel wounds, and not from explosives or gunfire themselves. Once infection set in and gas gangrene made its hideous appearance, all one could do was wait, and maybe hope that the suffering would end soon...until sulfa drugs appeared on the scene.
   
   That era of sulfa drugs, and not the one of penicillin, was the first heroic age of antibiotics. Most of us, if asked to name the first wonder-drug antibiotic, would name penicillin. But long before penicillin, sulfa saved thousands of lives. Without sulfa around, Hoover's son died. With sulfa, FDR's son, and Winston Churchill, survived. Thomas Hager has done an excellent job in bringing this forgotten but extremely important story to life in "The Demon Under the Microscope". The former biographer of Linus Pauling has shown us how different it was to suddenly have a drug that cured infections that previously would have almost certainly killed you. The time until the 1930s was a scary time, with every kind of Strep and Staph waiting to kill you after entering your body through the slightest cut, and diseases whose names we don't even remember now were rampant and much feared. It was sulfa that first declared war on and largely eradicated all these infections.
   
   At the center of the sulfa story is the remarkable doctor and biochemist Gerhard Domagk. Domagk was an officer in WW1 and saw thousands needlessly die around him in agony, all because nobody could prevent the infection that set in after they were hit. After the war, Domagk went through a succession of jobs and finally ended up at Bayer, where he had a trailblazing career in the discovery of new cures for old infections. Building upon Paul Ehrlich's convictions about azo dyes as bacteriocidal agents, he and his colleagues tested hundreds of analogs, until he hit on the right one. This was the beginning of SAR as we know it today. And here, we can see the chemist's tragedy. Domagk tested the compounds, but it were two chemists who actually made them. Yet, they were excluded from the prize that Domagk would gather. This was not his fault, but really the workings of the Swedish committee, which did not behave this way for the first and last time. Patriotic and yet conscientious, Domagk stayed put after Hitler came to power, losing himself in his work to distract himself from the injustice that was taking place around him. In 1939, he was awarded the Nobel prize, but the Nazis did not allow him to accept it. Bayer itself became connected with the notorious IG Farben, which designed hydrogen cyanide vials (Zyklon B) for the gas chambers.
   
   There is much in the book that is eye-opening, and sulfa is only one chapter in a book that also deals with medical history and the social history of science. There were several things I was unaware of; one revelation was that the modern American university model is based on the German model. The Germans were the world leaders in both industry and academia, and the modern and highly successful trend of close collaboration between industry and academia was already widespread in Germany. For all their philosophical bent, the Germans never saw any contradiction between pure and applied research, and the university-industry collaboration and connection led to very fruitful research in engineering and medicine. The modern patent regime too was pioneered by German industry.
   
   The most important fact which I was not aware of was the pivotal albeit unfortunate role that sulfa played in revitalizing the FDA and granting it powers to implement laws that made it mandatory for manufacturers to display warnings and ingredients labels on their products. Before that, almost anyone could set up shop and sell metals, elixirs, and liquids that promised cures for everything from syphilis to baldness, a practice that went back two hundred years. But in the 1930s, through a series of unfortunate events, a concoction of sulfa in, of all the things, ethylene glycol, was sold extensively in many states. Today, we would be horrified at such large-scale use of an industrial solvent for mixing a drug. But at the time, there were almost no laws that required manufacturers to list such petty things as solvents on their bottles. The FDA was a skimpy and ineffectual agency at the time, with a few dozen agents scuttling around to mainly keep a check on excessive profit making. After the sulfa-ethylene glycol concoction was sold, a wave of death began that did not stop until several hundred people died, and public outrage changed the face of the FDA- and the way in which drugs are developed, manufactured and sold in the US- forever. After the tragedy, the FDA acquired new powers that it could have only dreamt of before. Of course, it took the thalidomide tragedy to have the kind of strict FDA regime that we have today, but the sulfa tragedy started it all, and made drugs substantially safer for the public.
   
   An amusing and ironic chemical fact also accompanies the discovery of sulfa. Even though it were the Germans who pioneered its development, it was a French group that discovered the most important fact about the drug; that it was not the azo chemical linkage, but the benzene sulfonamide group that was key to the action of the drug. Once they discovered this fact, all bets were off for the Germans, because the potent part of sulfa turned out to be benzene sulfonamide, a cheap bulk chemical that could not be patented! Even if the Germans tried to quickly get past this handicap by synthesizing new derivatives at a terrific pace to outnumber their French colleagues, the cat was out of the bag, and they could never top their initial success.
   
   Gradually, sulfa made it everywhere, and into the United States through the perspicacity and interest of two Johns Hopkins researchers. It began to be marketed in every form and colour and flavour, as every derivative and analog. In the 1930s, it became the drug of choice for treating every imaginable kind of Strep or Staph infection, most of which it effectively tackled. Cure by sulfa was touted as a miracle cure, with its relentless and wondrous effect on cases that only ten years ago would have been totally hopeless. But as a drug, sulfa had already fallen behind. Penicillin had arived on the scene. In due course, resistance would develop to both drugs, albeit relatively gradually to sulfa.
   
   Domagk spent the last days of his life in gloomy peace, distraught by his country's destruction, and somewhat validated by the thousands of lives he had saved. Sulfa is still used for topical purposes.
   
   We now know that sulfa competes with PABA (para-amino benzoic acid) for the synthesis of dihydrofolate, an essential hub in the synthesis of folic acid. Sulfa and further related research led to, among other things, Methotrexate, a widely used current drug in cancer therapy. But in the end, what befell sulfa has befallen other antibiotics. The bugs have become resistant. When sulfa and penicillin were discovered, they were regarded as miracles. Perhaps we need another miracle for bad bugs today, and the age of fervent antibiotic research might be coming back to haunt us. But it should not be forgotten that sulfa was the first miracle drug, before penicillin.



2. What a wonderful sweep through a seemingly simple but world changing set of discoveries. How scary the world was before antibiotics! How much the discovery detailed in this book not only changed the world of pharmacy, it impacted who becomes an M.D. and how they do their job, and so one. I highly recommend this book.



3. It's not mentioned in the book, but it is marketed as AVC Cream, most commonly placed on gauze and packed into the [...] after hysterectomy. Other dosage forms are long obsolete, but this one is still in use and probably always will be.
   
   We hear all the time about antibiotic resistance, but most of us don't even think about what life was like before the drugs even existed. This is why home births really were safer prior to World War II, due to all the germs floating around in hospitals and NOTHING that could be done if infection struck. People, especially children like Hildegard Domagk, died from diseases we hardly bat an eye at now, and the drug got the ball rolling. I'm guessing we don't hear about it like we do with penicillin because it's not in general use any more.
   
   This book is mostly the history of sulfanilamide, the first really effective systemic antibacterial drug. The drug had some really weird side effects, so it probably wouldn't be considered safe by modern standards. It also addresses political and business issues surrounding the drug and is a mini-bio of its discoverer, Dr. Gerhard Domagk. Who's Hildegard? His daughter, who got a deadly infection after being poked with a needle and was one of the first people who life was saved by this drug. Last I heard, she was still living and would be in her late 70s.
   
   I purchased the book because of the chapter on the Elixir Sulfanilamide disaster of 1937, a very dark chapter in American medical history that has largely been forgotten to the point where I have never conversed with a fellow pharmacist who has ever heard of it. We associate the Massengill corporation with douches (LOL) but yes, that's who made it, and no, nobody tested the concoction to see if it was safe for human consumption before sending it out on the market, where it could be sold without a prescription. Sulfanilamide does not dissolve readily in alcohol or water, but it does dissolve in diethylene glycol (antifreeze) so that's what was used, causing the deaths of 107 of the 353 people known to have taken it. The History Channel did a program on this a few years ago called "Elixir of Death"; the author who was working on a book of this title who was prominently featured in the program died in a car accident shortly before it aired in 2003.
   
   I also had the privilege of seeing Thomas Hager read from his book on C-Span II's Book TV. This was quite interesting to hear perspectives straight from the author.



4. Within the first fifty pages this book took it's place in my top ten non-fiction works. It includes history, science, biography and business wrapped together in a fast-paced and clear manner. It's a shock to see some of the often fatal diseases our grandparents faced that today have been all but forgotten. A world where a boil, insect bite, or cut finger could result in an ugly death. The author states that this is a book about "antibiotics," he includes the sulfa drugs to be part of this class, rather than just the traditional antibiotics derived from molds. With his description the author is being a bit disingenuous, I suspect to help market his book. The book is about the sulfa drugs which were the first effective and industrially manufactured family of drugs. This entire class of drugs have been all but forgotten. The details of the discovery and use of traditional "antibiotics" is well documented. I personally might have skipped a book subtitled "The Story of the Sulfa Drugs". I am very happy to have been slightly mislead and directed to this excellent history.



5. Very informative. An easy read. Once I started, I couldn't stop. Definitely an item to be in any medical history collection.

No comments about The Life of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 1: Journalist, 1706-1730 (Life of Benjamin Franklin).

5 comments about Dr. Folkman's War: Angiogenesis and the Struggle to Defeat Cancer.

1. Chances are someone close to you has succumbed to the ravages of cancer, while you and the medical establishment could only sit by and watch the process reach its inevitable conclusion. The good news is, for nearly 40 years, Dr. Judah Folkman has been pursuing a cure for cancer -- or at least a way to fight tumors more effectively than chemotherapy or radiation -- that only until very recently has garnered serious attention. Dr. Folkman's theory is called angiogenesis, the process by which cancer cells emit an agent which triggers the growth of blood vessels to feed the growth of the cancer itself. For years Dr. Folkman's idea was basically scoffed at as the flailings of an amateur researcher, but Cooke shows how Dr. Folkman has perservered -- while maintaining his brilliant career as a physician -- and eventually, through a slow accumulation of experimental evidence, as well as the discovery of several antiangionesis agents, turned opinion around. Throughout this engaging and fascinating retelling of Folkman's journey, Cooke also provides an eye-opening account of the workings of academia, medical research, and their relationships to those Orwellian biotech companies you keep hearing about. The science is clear and vivid, the battle to defeat cancer inspiring, and the promise of victory -- thankfully, finally -- just around the corner.



2. This book by Robert Cooke is incredible! Mr. Cooke is able to explain to the average layperson the medical concepts of angeiogeneis conceived by the most under-valued person of our time: Dr. Judah Folkman. Dr. Folkman is to cancer what Salk was to Polio! Personally, Dr. Judah Folkman is my hero! A real hero, deserving of the Nobel Prize....and I don't speak lightly. I am a cancer patient that has recently learned that my cancer (thought was beat) has advanced to my lungs. The ONLY therapy for me is in an ANGIOGENESIS drug therapy program for a drug currently in study and labeled as "PI-88." I am just so confident this drug will work. I am the only patient with my type of cancer cell (adenoid cystic carninoma), so I am a little bit more of a lab rat for this program.

   God Bless Dr. Folkman and h is incredible perserverance! His story should be a movie----a tale better than SeaBiscuit! He is my SeaBiscuit!

   LHH




3. This book is a very well done documentary of the trials Dr. Folkman went through to have his ideas on cancer treatment considered. His ideas are now becoming the new approach, offering much needed hope for patients and their families. For anyone interested in cancer, this book is worthwhile.



4. This book is great gives a good understanding of the research community and the search to understand angiogenisis.



5. Spectacular, but not a quick read! If you or someone you know has cancer, then this is a must read. The author did a marvelous job of chronicaling the research path to great discoveries for cancer. Unfortunately, Dr. Folkman passed away last month but after reading this book you will have a better understanding of the legacy of important research he left behind and how it is continuing by the minute

1 comments about Jane Goodall: A Biography.

1. The book is not very in depth, but perfect for a young grade school child who needs someone amazing to report on. It might even inspire them to read up and research her even more to get a more detailed account of what she has done and is currently working on.

5 comments about The Best of James Herriot: Favourite Memories of a Country Vet.

1. Even though the book was used, it was in excellent condition. The pictures throughout help to make this book a very good purchase for the money. James Herriot is a wonderful storyteller and the reader finds himself/herself able to have the experience of almost being there in person.



2. What can one add to the already vivid detail of the life of Alfred Wight? Fortunately nothing except the illustrations for those of us with little perception of what the farming community and the towns around Yorkshire were like in the 30's and 40's. The fact too, that it's in hardcover will ensure it's permanent place on your bookshelf of treasured writings.



3. If you love animals and you haven't read James Herriot then you simply must! These stories are so full of humour, sadness, joy and lots of plain common sense and wisdom that you will love every minute of reading them. It is amazing to read that the author had such a long struggle to have his work published that he almost gave up. What a loss to the world that would have been! The story of his life is told by his son in the book "The Real James Herriot" - make sure you read that one also!



4. A very bright and beautiful book, with nice pictures and side articles, which help you know more about animals described in the book. All stories are easy to read and full of sparkly humor and affection to animals and nature. Reading it you may easily find yourself laughing over things at one page, and crying at the next one. This book is equally great for both children and adults.



5. If you like James Herriot's Stories, this is a great compilation. It arrived quickly and in perfect condition.
   
   thank you!

2 comments about If You Love This Planet: A Plan to Heal the Earth.

1. You might assume from the title that this book is devoted to environmental issues and solutions. You'd be partially right, but this book is much more. Caldicott also goes into the birth and development of the American corporate machine and of the equally significant public relations industry. Instead of just explaining what's wrong with the planet and what you can do about it, she educates us about how we got where we are, and how our culture of conspicuous consumption came to be.

   This book is a real eye opener and will cause you to question some of your most basic ideas about American society.




2. All thinking persons now recognize that the deepening crisis of climate change requires urgent action to transform the global economy to a condition whereby most energy is supplied without carbon. All serious energy analysts, including the International Agency Agency (in the public sector) and the World Energy Council (in the private sector) recognize that this clean-energy revolution cannot conceivably be accomplished without nuclear power as a leading and expanding source of such clean energy. All around the world, governments representing some 80% of humankind are comprehending and acting on this reality. Indeed, Ms. Caldicott's own country, Australia, which for decades has been content to burn coal for its electricity, is now moving rapidly to embrace the use of nuclear power. Unfortunately, Ms. Caldicott, long known for her hysterical and myth-ridden anti-nuclear tirades, cannot possibly grasp this truth. Thus, she couples her well-founded concerns about the planet's future to unrealistic prescriptions, which if followed, would propel us into the very catastrophe she fears. This doctor may have diagnosed the disease, but no one should listen to her foolish nostrums concerning the cure. This must be said without qualification: When it comes to climate change, Dr. Caldicott is a quack.

1 comments about The Einstein Almanac.

1. This fine book is essentially a chronological bibliography of Einstein's writings. While not exhaustive (Calaprice uses the word "selected"), this book provides a good real glimpse into what Einstein actually thought and researched and wrote as a scientist, philosopher and humanist from 1901-1955. Serious fans of Einstein (like myself) who don't have the multi-volume Collected Papers of Albert Einstein at arm's length will find this little book quite useful. Here you find the titles of articles, papers, essays, and even interviews accompanied by the originals in German (where appropriate). Descriptive or explanatory comments follow most of them. Did you know that Einstein studied the meandering of rivers? He wrote some illuminating papers on this geological question. Or that he and Leo Szilard patented home refrigeration by the "Einstein-Szilard pump"? Most standard biographies wouldn't mention these. But an Einstein almanac might. This one does. (The important scientific papers are of course not neglected.)
   
   To place Einstein's life in context, Calaprice includes many historical and scientific events - some of which bear only a remote relevance to Einstein. I personally think these can be replaced by more biographical info. For example, what James Watson and Murray Gell-Mann did, while interesting and important, hardly merit entry into an Einstein Almanac. What Otto Hahn did is more relevant and may be included. There are other books on the history of science in the twentieth century and even more on the history of historical events. My idea of an Einstein almanac would exclude anything not directly related or relevant to Einstein. If it were up to me, any event not directly involving Einstein I would ruthlesssly exclude.
   
   This is my main humble criticism (and my own opinion). One other shortcoming is that few personal letters are included. But this is quite understandable because letters don't usually carry titles. Also, Einstein wrote so many letters in his lifetime that to list them all and summarize them with comments would be a herculean task. For letters, interested students should refer to the CPAE. But I think a separate chapter on the most important letters Einstein wrote might be a good idea for the next edition (if any). Some of Einstein's most incisive thoughts are found in his letters (such as those to Max Born) and a brief overview of these may be useful.
   
   One more suggestion for improvement (bear with me) might be a detailed timeline of Einstein's life. Timelines differ in details. Very extensive and all-inclusive timelines provide a virtually day-by-day chronology. One outstanding example of these would be University of Delaware professor Leo Lemay's Documentary History of Benjamin Franklin, which is an on-going project available on the Web. It gives impressive details of what Franklin was doing and where he was doing it on numerous specific dates. Calaprice's other books about Einstein already have brief timelines. An Einstein Almanac could use a very detailed one. (This book also has a brief timeline of Einstein's early years - but then again not all the details seem to me relevant. A lot of things happened in 1895 for Einstein, but I see no point in mentioning the invention of the Gillette razor, for instance, because this has nothing to do with Einstein, whether or not he used one.) Just listing all of Einstein's personal and scientific activities, rather than non-Einstein events, can be a worthwhile if lengthy task. But an almanac is designed to be full of dates.
   
   Leave out the fat of irrelevant non-Einstein stuff, and build more muscle of Einstein-exclusive matters, and this book could be even better and more useful than it already is. If this book is also an on-going project, then there is room for growth on what is in my view an excellent basis.
   

4 comments about Tesla: Master of Lightning.

1. How could Margaret Cheney (Tesla : Man Out Of Time) and Robert Uth (Tesla : Master Of Lightning) improve upon their past individual works (a book and documentary video, respectively)? By combining their efforts to produce this wonderful book, that's how. The informative text is interspersed with 250 b&w and duotone images that show Tesla and the era in which he excelled (truly a man out of time). Also included are 36 sidebars that explain some of the technical aspects of Tesla's works. After reading several other books on Tesla, I thought I knew it all. I'm happy to say that this one proved me wrong. Not to be missed by true Tesla fans.



2. I found this book to be an excellent overview of Tesla's work and life. It's also a quick read. The book successfully conveys the image of Tesla as a remarkable inventor whose work and ideas were at the very forefront of the practical application of electromagnetic theory.
   
   The book plays along uncritically, however, with Tesla's apparently self cultivated image of being a Wizard / Scientist. Many of Tesla's more controversial ideas and clams that were never, and have never been substantiated through experiment, can be dismissed as poppycock. By contrast all of Tesla's successful ideas rest on very firm scientic foundations. The Author makes no attempt to discriminate one from the other. Instead, unsubstantiated claims are sprinkled liberally with vague references to missing documents and political intrigue.
   
   One excellent example of Tesla's tendancy for hyperbole is his claim of having built and tested an oscillator cable of creating earthquakes. Such a claim would have elicited knowing smirks even from 19th century scientists. Anyone doubting the foolishness of such a claim would do well to stay away from earth compactors and jackhammers, lest the Earth itself split in two! The Author(s)' failure to address Tesla's penchant for embellishment and hyperbole, and other odd aspects of Tesla's character (Other than frequent idle speculation on his sexual orientation) makes for a rather flat and onesided presentation.



3. Fascinating. Tesla was born Serbian Orthodox in what is now Croatia (formerly part of Yugoslavia). Came to New York as a young man and lived and worked in the U.S. from the 1890s into the 1930s. He is often described as being "ahead of his time": He envisioned, designed, and even patented electronic devices some of which are only today being practically realized. The supporting technology or scientific knowledge did not yet exist for many of them, though he accurately theorized that they would be possible.
   
   Various circumstances contributed to his being little known in America today (and not credited, even by scholars, with all that he accomplished). These include his unwillingness to work with wealthy corporate sponsors (as did Edison and Marconi) and the fact that much of his later work dealt with weaponry and thus was classified after his death. Also, his papers were returned to his native land and the ensuing Cold War prevented Western researchers from accessing them until recently. Many of his inventions-such as radio, AC electrical power, and radar-have long been credited to others. He foresaw-and his work contributed to the invention of-telephones, television, X-rays, satellite transmission, and directed energy weapons. He was also eccentric, probably suffered from OCD, and lived much of his life in poverty. This book downplays his eccentricities and paints him with an honest but very admiring brush.



4. This book about Tesla does not offer a very definitive overview about the man and the scientist.I thought this particular biography on the life of Tesla was rather weak.There are much better ones around.The best one being,'The Wizard'.The pictures are quite interesting,showing many of his inventions and social situations concerning the work and exhibits by Nikola Tesla.Yet,from a scientific technical point-of-view this book is light-weight on formulas and construction.Die-hard fans of the Tesla genre,would all agree,that this book could be better.Maybe the authors wanted to attract more readers ,by not scaring them off with too much scientific jargon. I would still recommend this Tesla book.

No comments about Cosmic Anger: Abdus Salam - The First Muslim Nobel Scientist.