Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code

  • Matthew Cobb
Profile (2015) 9781781251409 | ISBN: 978-1-7812-5140-9

James Watson's The Double Helix (Athenaeum, 1968) and Horace Judson's The Eighth Day of Creation (Touchstone, 1979) are classics on the 1953 discovery of DNA's structure, and the research that consolidated it. Zoologist Matthew Cobb richly recontexualizes the tale, tracing the interplay between biology, chemistry and physics that led to and amplified the breakthrough. This is a lucid explication of the science and the stories of key players, from X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin and physicist Max Delbrück to Oswald Avery, who linked DNA to genes, and information theorist Claude Shannon.

Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve

  • Ian Morris
Princeton University Press (2015) 9780691160399 | ISBN: 978-0-6911-6039-9

Energy capture — as a “brute material force” — shapes human values, argues archaeologist Ian Morris in this global-scale study of cultural variation. Looking at modes of capture from hunting and gathering to the agricultural and industrial revolutions, he avers that each determines population size, social organization and values. Now, writes Morris, our globalized society faces a “Malthusian collapse” — and a lurch towards new values — driven by nuclear weapons, climate change and digitization. With contributions from writer Margaret Atwood, sinologist Jonathan Spence and others.

The Naked Surgeon

  • Samer Nashef
Scribe (2015) 9781922247933 | ISBN: 978-1-9222-4793-3

UK consultant cardiac surgeon Samer Nashef joins the swelling ranks of medics who have penned frank inside stories. Piquant detail abounds: operating on the heart, for instance, involves “twisting it, pressing on it, and sometimes turning it upside down”. But it is Nashef's long study of risk that injects nuance. It began in 1977, when he discovered that arterial surgeons were responsible for the worst outcomes in a sample of abdominal aortic aneurysm operations. Such failures have, he shows, driven quality measurement in medicine, including his own heart-surgery risk model, EuroSCORE.

Pig Tales: An Omnivore's Quest for Sustainable Meat

  • Barry Estabrook
W. W. Norton (2015) 9780393240245 | ISBN: 978-0-3932-4024-5

Cheap pork should give us pause, writer Barry Estabrook argues in this cogent, level-headed investigation of the pig as raised and researched. The animal is one of the most intelligent ever domesticated, yet some 97 million in the United States are packed into reeking factory farms, with widespread 'crating' of pregnant sows. Yet as Estabrook reveals, humane, state-of-the-art husbandry is within our grasp and ultimately more profitable. He introduces an impressive group of animal scientists, farmers and pigs, from computer-savvy lab piglets to havoc-wreaking feral hogs.

The Technical Image: A History of Styles in Scientific Imagery

Edited by:
  • Horst Bredekamp,
  • Vera Dünkel &
  • Birgit Schneider
University of Chicago Press (2015) 9780226258843 | ISBN: 978-0-2262-5884-3

This multidisciplinary study trains an art historian's eye on historical scientific imagery. Editors Horst Bredekamp, Vera Dünkel and Birgit Schneider draw on research from the Humboldt University of Berlin and a range of haunting images. They show that an iconic 1896 radiograph of a hand by X-ray discoverer Wilhelm Röntgen prompted both rhapsodies over a “photography of the invisible” and frustration among medics struggling to use such images for diagnosis.