The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age
Nathan Wolfe - 2011
In The Viral Storm, award-winning biologist Nathan Wolfe tells the story of how viruses and human beings have evolved side by side through history; how deadly viruses like HIV, swine flu, and bird flu almost wiped us out in the past; and why modern life has made our species vulnerable to the threat of a global pandemic.Wolfe's research missions to the jungles of Africa and the rain forests of Borneo have earned him the nickname "the Indiana Jones of virus hunters," and here Wolfe takes readers along on his groundbreaking and often dangerous research trips—to reveal the surprising origins of the most deadly diseases and to explain the role that viruses have played in human evolution.In a world where each new outbreak seems worse than the one before, Wolfe points the way forward, as new technologies are brought to bear in the most remote areas of the world to neutralize these viruses and even harness their power for the good of humanity. His provocative vision of the future will change the way we think about viruses, and perhaps remove a potential threat to humanity's survival.
COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We are the Prey
Peter R. Breggin - 2021
It discloses for the first time the actual blueprint and master plan that that was ten years in the making by global predators before the pandemic: a plan to reorganize the world in the name of public health. Billionaires, government agencies, giant funds, and major industries collaborated years ahead of time to lay the groundwork for what would become Operation Warp Speed and the Great Reset in 2020. All this is disclosed, individuals and groups are named, and their plans for the future are documented. The book concludes with chapters on what America and the world must do in the coming weeks and months to save humanity's freedoms.Many top medical and public health experts treating and examining COVID 19 agree this is the most comprehensive book about who and what is behind the draconian measures that are crushing individual freedoms and many of the societies and economies of the Western World including the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Australia.Three of these medical doctors have confirmed this in their introductions to the book: physicians Peter McCullough MD MPH, Vladimir "Zev" Zelenko MD and Elizabeth Lee Vliet MD. They are echoed by endorsements from Robert F Kennedy Jr. and Paul Alexander PhD.This book thoroughly documents solid answers to these tragic questions about the global predators who are reaping enormous benefits from COVID-19 suffering including wealth, power and the destruction of America as an opposition to globalism.Who are the "they"-these Global Predators? What are their motives and their plans for us? How can we defend against them?Why did they:■ Plan Warp Speed for a SARS-CoV pandemic years before it came?■ Distribute mRNA and DNA vaccines that killed lab animals and now humans?■ Collaborate with the Chinese making pandemic viruses & bioweapons?■ Hide the origin of SARS-CoV-2 in the Wuhan Institute?■ Let China spread the virus around the world on passenger planes?■ Give so much power to Dr. Anthony Fauci?Why do they continue to:■ Prohibit cheap, available, safe and effective COVID-19 treatments?■ Impose draconian closures on our society and economy?■ Disproportionately harm or destroy small businesses and churches?■ Make us wear masks and distance ourselves from each other?■ Exaggerate the death rate from COVID-19 to frighten us?■ Hide the high and growing vaccine death rate from all of us?■ Make experimental "vaccines" that turn our bodies against ourselves?Dr. Breggin is a physician with 70+ scientific articles and 20+ medical texts and popular books. He is among the world's most experienced medical experts in landmark legal cases in psychiatry and neurosurgery, and now in COVID-19. The Breggins' bestsellers include Talking Back to Prozac and Toxic Psychiatry. Their research led the United States to cancel the deadly Chinese collaboration.Breggin is an intrepid scholar and is assiduous and methodological as he assembles all the pieces to the puzzle. His research, carried out with his wife Ginger, is impeccable, and his incisive approach sears the neck of those whose aim it is to wield power, control, and instill fear among the world's wealthiest nations.
American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts
Chris McGreal - 2018
But American Overdose exposes the powerful forces they were up against, including the pharmaceutical industry's coopting of the Food and Drug Administration and Congress in the drive to push painkillers--resulting in the resurgence of heroin cartels in the American heartland. McGreal tells the story, in terms both broad and intimate, of people hit by a catastrophe they never saw coming. Years in the making, its ruinous consequences will stretch years into the future.
Proust Was a Neuroscientist
Jonah Lehrer - 2007
Its greatest detriment to the world has been its unfettered desire to play with and alter them: science for science's sake, as if it offered the only path to knowledge.According to Lehrer, when it comes to the human brain, the world of art unraveled such mysteries long before the neuroscientists: "This book is about artists who anticipated the discoveries of science who discovered truths about the human mind that science is only now discovering." 'Proust Was a Neuroscientist' is a dazzling inquiry into the nature of the mind and of the truths harvested by its first explorers: artists like Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Auguste Escoffier, Marcel Proust, Paul Cozanne, Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf. What they understood intuitively and expressed through their respective art forms -- the fallibility of memory, the malleability of the brain, the subtleties of vision, and the deep structure of language -- science has only now begun to measure and confirm. Blending biography, criticism, and science writing, Lehrer offers a lucid examination of eight artistic thinkers who lit the path toward a greater understanding of the human mind and a deeper appreciation of the ineffable mystery of life.
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
Matthew Walker - 2017
Charting the most cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs, and marshalling his decades of research and clinical practice, Walker explains how we can harness sleep to improve learning, mood and energy levels, regulate hormones, prevent cancer, Alzheimer's and diabetes, slow the effects of aging, and increase longevity. He also provides actionable steps towards getting a better night's sleep every night.
Forensics: What Bugs, Burns, Prints, DNA and More Tell Us About Crime
Val McDermid - 2014
To the right listener, they tell us all about themselves: where they came from, how they lived, how they died - and who killed them. Forensic scientists can unlock the mysteries of the past and help justice to be done using the messages left by a corpse, a crime scene or the faintest of human traces. Forensics uncovers the secrets of forensic medicine, drawing on interviews with top-level professionals, ground-breaking research and Val McDermid's own experience to lay bare the secrets of this fascinating science. And, along the way, she wonders at how maggots collected from a corpse can help determine time of death, how a DNA trace a millionth the size of a grain of salt can be used to convict a killer and how a team of young Argentine scientists led by a maverick American anthropologist uncovered the victims of a genocide.In her crime novels, Val McDermid has been solving complex crimes and confronting unimaginable evil for years. Now, she's looking at the people who do it for real, and real crime scenes. It's a journey that will take her to war zones, fire scenes and autopsy suites, and bring her into contact with extraordinary bravery and wickedness, as she traces the history of forensics from its earliest beginnings to the cutting-edge science of the modern day.
The First Shots: The Epic Rivalries and Heroic Science Behind the Race to the Coronavirus Vaccine
Brendan Borrell - 2021
Chaotic politics. Billionaire entrepreneurs. Award-winning journalist Brendan Borrell brings the defining story of our times alive through compulsively readable, first-time reporting on the players leading the fight against a vicious virus. The First Shots, soon to be the subject of an HBO limited series with superstar director and producer Adam McKay (Succession, Vice, The Big Short), draws on exclusive, high-level access to weave together the intense vaccine-race conflicts among hard-driving, heroic scientists and the epic rivalries among Washington power players that shaped 18 months of fear, resolve, and triumph. From infectious disease expert Michael Callahan, an American doctor secretly on the ground in Wuhan in January 2020 to gauge the terrifying ravages of Disease X; to Robert (Dr. Bob) Kadlec, one of Operation Warp Speed’s architects, whose audacious plans for the American people run straight into the buzz saw of the Trump White House factions; to Stéphane Bancel of upstart Moderna Therapeutics going toe-to-toe with pharma behemoth Pfizer, The First Shots lays bare, in a way we have not seen, the full stunning story behind the medical science “moon shot” of our lifetimes.
Madness: A Brief History
Roy Porter - 2002
Roy Porter's historical overview of madness reveals the radically different perceptions of madness and approaches to its treatment, from antiquity to the beginning of the 21st century.Looking back on his confinement to Bethlem, Restoration playwright Nathaniel Lee declared: "They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me." As Roy Porter shows in Madness: A Brief History, thinking about who qualifies as insane, what causes mental illness, and how such illness should be treated has varied wildly throughout recorded history, sometimes veering dangerously close to the arbitrariness Lee describes and often encompassing cures considerably worse than the illness itself.Drawing upon eyewitness accounts of doctors, writers, artists, and the mad themselves, Roy Porter tells the story of our changing notions of insanity and of the treatments for mental illness that have been employed from antiquity to the present day. Beginning with 5,000-year-old skulls with tiny holes bored in them (to allow demons to escape), through conceptions of madness as an acute phase in the trial of souls, as an imbalance of "the humors," as the "divine fury" of creative genius, or as the malfunctioning of brain chemistry, Porter shows the many ways madness has been perceived and misperceived in every historical period. He takes us on a fascinating round of treatments, ranging from exorcism and therapeutic terror--including immersion in a tub of eels--to the first asylums, shock therapy, the birth of psychoanalysis, and the current use of psychotropic drugs.Throughout, Madness: A Brief History offers a balanced view, showing both the humane attempts to help the insane as well as the ridiculous and often cruel misunderstanding that have bedeviled our efforts to heal the mind of its myriad afflictions.
Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease
Gary Taubes - 2004
Yet despite this advice, we have seen unprecedented epidemics of obesity and diabetes. Taubes argues that the problem lies in refined carbohydrates, like white flour, easily digested starches, and sugars, and that the key to good health is the kind of calories we take in, not the number. In this groundbreaking book, award-winning science writer Gary Taubes shows us that almost everything we believe about the nature of a healthy diet is wrong.
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
John Carreyrou - 2018
Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at $9 billion, putting Holmes's worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn't work.For years, Holmes had been misleading investors, FDA officials, and her own employees. When Carreyrou, working at The Wall Street Journal, got a tip from a former Theranos employee and started asking questions, both Carreyrou and the Journal were threatened with lawsuits. Undaunted, the newspaper ran the first of dozens of Theranos articles in late 2015. By early 2017, the company's value was zero and Holmes faced potential legal action from the government and her investors. Here is the riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a disturbing cautionary tale set amid the bold promises and gold-rush frenzy of Silicon Valley.
Women in White Coats: How the First Women Doctors Changed the World of Medicine
Olivia Campbell - 2021
In the early 1800s, women were dying in large numbers from treatable diseases because they avoided receiving medical care. Examinations performed by male doctors were often demeaning and even painful. In addition, women faced stigma from illness—a diagnosis could greatly limit their ability to find husbands, jobs or be received in polite society.Motivated by personal loss and frustration over inadequate medical care, Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake fought for a woman’s place in the male-dominated medical field. For the first time ever, Women in White Coats tells the complete history of these three pioneering women who, despite countless obstacles, earned medical degrees and paved the way for other women to do the same. Though very different in personality and circumstance, together these women built women-run hospitals and teaching colleges—creating for the first time medical care for women by women.With gripping storytelling based on extensive research and access to archival documents, Women in White Coats tells the courageous history these women made by becoming doctors, detailing the boundaries they broke of gender and science to reshape how we receive medical care today.
For the Good of Mankind?: The Shameful History of Human Medical Experimentation
Vicki Oransky Wittenstein - 2013
Result: The world's first vaccine. Experiment: A slave woman is forced to undergo more than thirty operations without anesthesia. Result: The beginnings of modern gynecology. Experiment: From 1946 to 1953, seventy-four boys are fed oatmeal laced with radioactive iron and calcium. Result: A better understanding of the effects of radioactivity on the human body. Experimental incidents such as these paved the way for crucial medical discoveries and lifesaving cures and procedures. But they also violated the rights of their subjects, many of whom did not give their consent to the experiments. The subjects suffered excruciating pain and humiliation. Some even died as a result of the procedures. Even in the twenty-first century—despite laws, regulations, and ethical conventions—the tension between medical experimentation and patient rights continues. How do doctors balance the need to test new medicines and procedures with their ethical and moral duty to protect the rights of human subjects? What price has been paid for medical knowledge? Can we learn from the broken oaths of the past? Take a harrowing journey through some of history's greatest medical advances—and its most horrifying medical atrocities. You'll read about orphans injected with lethal tuberculosis and concentration camp inmates tortured by Nazi doctors. You’ll also learn about radiation experimentation and present-day clinical trials that prove fatal. Through these stories, explore the human suffering that has gone hand in hand with medical advancement.
Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live
Nicholas A. Christakis - 2020
Drawing on momentous (yet dimly remembered) historical epidemics, contemporary analyses, and cutting-edge research from a range of scientific disciplines, bestselling author, physician, sociologist, and public health expert Nicholas A. Christakis explores what it means to live in a time of plague—an experience that is paradoxically uncommon to the vast majority of humans who are alive, yet deeply fundamental to our species.Unleashing new divisions in our society as well as opportunities for cooperation, this 21st-century pandemic has upended our lives in ways that will test, but not vanquish, our already frayed collective culture. Featuring new, provocative arguments and vivid examples ranging across medicine, history, sociology, epidemiology, data science, and genetics, Apollo's Arrow envisions what happens when the great force of a deadly germ meets the enduring reality of our evolved social nature.
The Man Who Couldn't Stop
David Adam - 2014
In this captivating fusion of science, history and personal memoir, writer David Adam explores the weird thoughts that exist within every mind, and how they drive millions of us towards obsessions and compulsions.David has suffered from OCD for twenty years, and The Man Who Couldn’t Stop is his unflinchingly honest attempt to understand the condition and his experiences. What might lead an Ethiopian schoolgirl to eat a wall of her house, piece by piece; or a pair of brothers to die beneath an avalanche of household junk that they had compulsively hoarded? At what point does a harmless idea, a snowflake in a clear summer sky, become a blinding blizzard of unwanted thoughts? Drawing on the latest research on the brain, as well as historical accounts of patients and their treatments, this is a book that will challenge the way you think about what is normal, and what is mental illness.Told with fierce clarity, humour and urgent lyricism, this extraordinary book is both the haunting story of a personal nightmare, and a fascinating doorway into the darkest corners of our minds.
Stem Cell Therapy: A Rising Tide: How Stem Cells Are Disrupting Medicine and Transforming Lives
Neil H. Riordan - 2017
When there aren’t enough of them, or they aren’t working properly, chronic diseases can manifest and persist. From industry leaders, sport stars, and Hollywood icons to thousands of everyday, ordinary people, stem cell therapy has helped when standard medicine failed. Many of them had lost hope. These are their stories. Neil H Riordan, author of MSC: Clinical Evidence Leading Medicine’s Next Frontier, the definitive textbook on clinical stem cell therapy, brings you an easy-to-read book about how and why stem cells work, and why they’re the wave of the future. “Neil takes readers on a riveting journey through the past, present and future of stem cell therapy. His well-researched, educational and entertaining book could change your life. I highly recommend it.” Tony Robbins, NY Times #1 Bestselling Author 100 years old will soon become the new 60. Stem cells are a key therapeutic to enable this future. Dr. Riordan’s book is your guide to why this is true and how you will benefit. A must read for anyone who cares about extending their healthy lifespan.” Peter H. Diamandis, MD; Founder, XPRIZE & Singularity University; Co-Founder, Human Longevity, Inc.; Author of NY Times Best Sellers Abundance and Bold