Showing posts with label history of science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history of science. Show all posts

Thursday, May 10, 2012

The Poison Paradox: Chemicals As Friends and Foes Review

The Poison Paradox: Chemicals As Friends and Foes
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I bought this book because I am interested in science and especially in chemistry. I wasn't disappointed because I found it real fascinating. I like the way its full of fascinating stories about poisoning but also theres lots of interesting information about chemicals. So its the kind of book you can just pick up and read a section of, sort of dip into. At the beginning theres a chapter on how chemicals get inside us and what happens to them. Then there are chapters on drugs, pesticides, chemicals in factories, at home, chemicals in food and so on. And at the end theres a chapter on assessment of risks from chemicals. It shows that chemicals are not all bad.I reckon everyone whose interested in chemicals should get this book.

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Every day we are surrounded by chemicals that are potentially harmful. Some of these we take intentionally in the form of drugs; some we take unknowingly through the food we eat, and the environment around us. John Timbrell explores what makes particular chemicals harmful, what their effects are, and how we can test for them. He examines drugs such as Paracetamol and what it does to the body; Ricin, the most toxic substance known to man; Paraquat, a widely available weedkiller; and how the puffer fish, eaten as a delicacy in Japan, can kill. Using case studies from all around the world, such as the Spanish Oil syndrome which made over 20,000 people ill in Madrid, Timbrell uncovers the facts behind chemical scares. He shows how, with a rational, scientific, and balanced approach, risks can be assessed and managed safely.

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Saturday, April 28, 2012

Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière Review

Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière
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This is a must-read and must-have. Beautifully designed and brilliantly written, covering cultural and psychological history and the significance of photography as a new medium and its impact on the emerging modern world. The invention of Hysteria is about new phenomenon being created as performance and recorded in images. An eye-opening book!

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In this classic of French cultural studies, Georges Didi-Huberman tracesthe intimate and reciprocal relationship between the disciplines of psychiatry andphotography in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the immense photographicoutput of the Salpetriere hospital, the notorious Parisian asylum for insane andincurable women, Didi-Huberman shows the crucial role played by photography in theinvention of the category of hysteria. Under the direction of the medical teacherand clinician Jean-Martin Charcot, the inmates of Salpetriere identified ashysterics were methodically photographed, providing skeptical colleagues with visualproof of hysteria's specific form. These images, many of which appear in this book,provided the materials for the multivolume album Iconographie photographique de laSalpetriere.As Didi-Huberman shows, these photographs were far from simply objectivedocumentation. The subjects were required to portray their hysterical "type"--theyperformed their own hysteria. Bribed by the special status they enjoyed in thepurgatory of experimentation and threatened with transfer back to the inferno of theincurables, the women patiently posed for the photographs and submitted topresentations of hysterical attacks before the crowds that gathered for Charcot's"Tuesday Lectures."Charcot did not stop at voyeuristic observation. Throughtechniques such as hypnosis, electroshock therapy, and genital manipulation, heinstigated the hysterical symptoms in his patients, eventually giving rise to hatredand resistance on their part. Didi-Huberman follows this path from complicity toantipathy in one of Charcot's favorite "cases," that of Augustine, whose image cropsup again and again in the Iconographie. Augustine's virtuosic performance ofhysteria ultimately became one of self-sacrifice, seen in pictures of ecstasy,crucifixion, and silent cries.

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Friday, March 16, 2012

Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century Review

Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century
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This is a very well written and entertaining book about a scientific administrator who played a major effort in organizing the technical responses required to anticipate and successfully meet the challenges of WWII. His skillful analysis, technical comprehension and political astuteness not only provided outstanding leadership at the time but shaped the intractions of goverment, industry and the academic community in such a fashion as to remain intact to this time. One comes awawy with an enormous respect for Dr. Bush. He must have been one tough character and difficult to deal with but he got the jobs done. It is a pity that his battles with Admiral Ernest King have, to my knowledge, never been documented. The issues they disagreed about were not trivial and their interactions must have been awesome. I read this book shortly after completing Tycho's Island and the similarity between the two men and the administrative issues they dealt with is both striking and illuminating.
Good men are hard to find and good books about them deserve our attention.

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Friday, September 9, 2011

Haldane, Mayr, and Beanbag Genetics Review

Haldane, Mayr, and Beanbag Genetics
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I find myself very perturbed that this book, which closely follows the previously published excellent and comprehensive paper by Rao and Nanjundiah in the Journal of the History of Biology, makes no mention of the prior work at all. Surely the author and the Oxford University Press must have been aware of the previous study which bears almost the same title and content. What is one to think?

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Haldane, Mayr, and Beanbag Genetics presents a summary of the classic exchange between two great biologists - J.B.S. Haldane and Ernst Mayr - regarding the value of the contributions of the mathematical school represented by J.B.S. Haldane, R.A. Fisher and S. Wright to the theory of evolution. Their pioneering contributions from 1918 to the 1960sdominated and shaped the field of population genetics, unique in the annals of science. In 1959, Mayr questioned what heregarded as the beanbag genetic approach of these pioneers to evolutionary theory, "an input or output of genes, as the adding of certain beans to a beanbag and the withdrawing of others." In 1964, Mayr's contention was refuted by Haldane in a remarkably witty, vigorous and pungent essay, "A defense of beanbag genetics" which compared the mathematical theory to a scaffolding within which a reasonably secure theory expressible in words may be built up. Correspondence between Haldane and Mayr is included.Beanbag genetics has come a long way since 1964. Mayr's (1959) critique of simple uncomplicated population genetics is no longer valid. Population genetics today includes much more than Mayr's beanbag genetics. Population genetics models now include multiple factors, linkage, dominance and epistasis. These may be regarded as the advanced beanbag models. Furthermore, population genetics and developmental genetics have become interdependent. Contemporary beanbag genetics includes molecular clocks, nucleotide diversity, coalescence and DNA-based phylogenetic trees, along with the four major holdovers from classical genetics, mutation, selection, migration and random drift. Molecular genetics has made it possible to study evolution rates at the nucleotide level. It is also possible today to compare DNA similarities and divergence in diverse species of animals and plants, which were not previously crossable.

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Saturday, August 20, 2011

Nature's Robots: A History of Proteins (Oxford Paperbacks) Review

Nature's Robots: A History of Proteins (Oxford Paperbacks)
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People who say that History of Science is boring haven't read this excellent book. This book is lively, entertaining and unbiased. While you can find dozens of accounts of the history of chemistry or physics, protein biochemistry has been overlooked for way too long. It was worth the wait though! As the proud owner of some of the material cited in this book (particularly on the history of enzymes), I had a blast reading "Nature's Robots". Read it and then go out and buy "Mendeleyeff's dream", they complement each other beautifully

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