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Experiment Eleven: Dark Secrets Behind the Discovery of a Wonder Drug  by Peter Pringle, Walker Books, 2012.  Tuberculosis Tuberculosis is caused by a bacterial species of the genus Mycobacterium. Within the bacterial genus Mycobacterium there are several species, one of which is tuberculosis. Within the species tuberculosis there are several strains, only some of which cause the disease tuberculosis. It is safer to perform initial tests of a new antibiotic on non-pathogenic

Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind  by V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, HarperCollins, 1999.  Phantom Limb Syndrome V.S. Ramachandran has done important work on phantom limbs. People who have had limbs amputated often retain the amputated limb in their body image. They also often experience pain in their phantom limbs. Ramachandran’s explanation is that the part of the brain devoted to the limb that was amputated now receives input from othe

The Other Brain: From Dementia to Schizophrenia, How New Discoveries about the Brain Are Revolutionizing Medicine and Science  by R. Douglas Fields, Simon & Schuster, 2009.  Neurons and Glia The cells that carry electrical impulses are called neurons. Neurons are unidirectional: they receive impulses on their dendrites and transmit nerve impulses along their axons. The axons are much longer than the dendrites. Glial (meaning glue) cells are cells in nervous tissue, such as th

Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia  by Richard Cytowic and David Eagleman, MIT Press, 2009.  Qualia Qualia are the subjective experience of the senses, such as redness, sweetness or pain. Synesthesia occurs when one sense induces the qualia of a different sense. For example, hearing a sound causing a person to see a colored image. Synesthesia is almost always unidirectional. If hearing a sound causes the person to see an image, then seeing an image

Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, The Nazis, and The Swiss Banks  by Mark Aarons and John Loftus, St. Martin's Griffin, 1998 (Revised edition).  Croatia and the Ustasha Croatia was a Roman Catholic part of Yugoslavia. A nationalist political organization called the Ustasha gained political power in the months before the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia. After the Nazis invaded, the Ustasha collaborated with the Nazis. The Ustasha  helped the Nazis kill Jews and Gypsies. On their own, the

The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth's Future  by Paul Sabin, Yale University Press, 2014.  Summary   Contrary to the predictions of Paul Ehrlich, the population bomb never exploded. Since the Earth’s natural resources are finite, there is naturally a fear that we will eventually run out of them. As they become more scarce, it would be expected that they would become more expensive. On the other hand, as the technology for locating and extracting nat

In Honor of Fadime: Murder and Shame  by Unni Wikan, University Of Chicago Press, 2008.  This book describes an honor killing that took place in Sweden to a young woman in a Kurdish immigrant family. The male members of her family were motivated by a shaming code. This is a detailed look at an honor killing in Sweden. The woman who was killed was a member of a family of Kurdish immigrants. While it was a Muslim family, the religion of Islam appears to have played only a small

The Comfort Women: Japan’s Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War  by George L. Hicks, W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.  Slave Labor The Japanese employed millions of slave laborers during their attempted conquest of Asia. The men worked in the mines, and built roads and bridges for the Japanese army. The women worked as prostitutes to service the Japanese army. Several tens of thousands of women were enslaved as prostitutes for the Japanese army during W

Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men  by Lundy Bancroft, Berkley, 2003.  Friends and co-workers of abusive men are often reluctant to b believe the wife, because the abuser behaves normally around them. Except for people who are mentally ill, abusers abuse not for emotional reasons, such as losing their temper, but rather because their thoughts and beliefs are wrong. Victims of abuse are at risk of being gaslighted. Keep a written journal of you

The Farhud: Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust  by Edwin Black, Dialog Press, 2012.  The Ottoman Empire The Ottoman Empire of Sultan Abdulhamid II included the oil-rich province of Mosul in present-day Iraq. The Ottoman Empire was an ally of Germany in World War I. To develop their oil wealth, the Turks first turned to Germany’s Deutsche Bank. Great Britain and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company tried to steal these oil rights away from Deutsche Bank.  Sykes-Picot Ag

Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization  by Paul Kriwaczek, St. Martin's Griffin, 2012.  Summary This book is a history of ancient Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The author describes the first cities in the world, founded by the Sumerians.  He continues the story forward to include the Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians. He also mentions the Elamites who lived to the east, in Iran, and the Hurrians, who lived to the north.  Sumeri

Madness in the Streets: How Psychiatry and the Law Abandoned the Mentally Ill  by Rael Jean Isaac and Virginia C. Armat, Treatment Advocacy Center, 2000.  Critics of Psychiatry This books describes the variety of forces that convinced society to empty state mental hospitals in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. It began with a movement against seeing mental illness as a medical problem and continued with an effort by misguided civil libertarians to increase patient

The Imp of the Mind: Exploring the Silent Epidemic of Obsessive Bad Thoughts  by Lee Baer, Dutton, 2001.  Summary The author, Lee Baer, discusses something he names “The Imp of the Perverse,” after a short story by Edgar Allen Poe. It is a little devil in our mind, which makes us think of doing things that are wrong. For most people, such bad thoughts are fleeting and easily ignored. But some people cannot stop worrying about doing terrible things. Some examples of obsessive

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right  by Atul  Gawande, Picador, 2011.  Errors of Omission In the current practice of medicine, the goal of avoiding errors of omission (forgetting to do things) is addressed in an informal and ad-hoc  way. The author suggests that medicine adopt a different method for avoiding errors of omission: the checklist. He describes how some early adopters have used checklists in medicine and achieved substantially lowering of error rates.

The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine  by Lindsey Fitzharris, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.  Lister’s Background Both Joseph Lister and his father,  Joseph Jackson Lister, were Quakers. Joseph Lister’s father, Joseph Jackson Lister, figured out a way to compensate for chromatic aberration in the lenses of microscopes. Chromatic aberration is the fact that glass bends light at different angles depending on the color (w

The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan  by Robert Kanigel, Washington Square Press, 1991.  Tamil Nadu: This book is a biography of an autodidact from India, and one of the deepest mathematicians of the twentieth century, with magical powers of intuition. Srinivasa Ramanujan was born in 1887 Tamil Nadu in Tamil Nadu in Southern India. He excelled at mathematics from an early age, but was unable to obtain a college degree, because he refused to study subjects

Breaking the Maya Code  (Third Edition) by Michael D. Coe, Thames & Hudson, 2012.  The Mayans of Central America left behind a body of  stone inscriptions. Mayan specialists have, until recently, made little progress in deciphering their writing system. This has changed in the last few decades, because a new approach has been taken. Modern linguists have studied the spoken languages of the descendants of the Mayans to help them decipher the stone inscriptions. Their efforts h

The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag  by Kang Chol-Hwan, Pierre Rigoulot,  Yair Reiner (Translator),  Basic Books, 2000.  Happy Childhood Kang Chol-Hwan grew up as part of a financially well-off family. Yodok The author's grandfather disappeared one day, because he criticized the regime. The government also punished the family. They looted their home and sent them to camp called Yodok, filled with other families that had also lived in Japan. The com

Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-up and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo  by John Crewdson, Back Bay Books, 2003.  Plagiarism in AIDS Research This book is a very detailed exposition of the scientific career of an AIDS researcher, Robert Gallo. Gallo claimed to have discovered the virus (HIV) that causes AIDS, but this virus was actually discovered in France. France sent a sample of their HIV virus to Gallo’s laboratory at the National Institutes of Heal

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup  by John Carreyrou, Vintage, 2018.  Blood Draws Elizabeth Anne Holmes fooled investors into believing that she had invented a machine to perform multiple blood assays on a single drop of blood obtained from a finger prick, thus obviating the need to perform a needle stick to draw a vial of blood. Her company was called Theranos. Her partner in this scam was Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani. Holmes was very secretive and few of her