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“Thought-provoking…[Allen] writes without sanctimony and never simplifies the people in his book or the moral issues his story inevitably raises." —Wall Street Journal Few diseases are more gruesome than typhus. Transmitted by body lice, it afflicts the dispossessed—refugees, soldiers, and ghettoized peoples—causing hallucinations, terrible headaches, boiling fever, and often death. The disease plagued the German army on the Eastern Front and left the Reich desperate for a vaccine. For this they turned to the brilliant and eccentric Polish zoologist Rudolf Weigl. In the 1920s, Weigl had created the first typhus vaccine using a method as bold as it was dangerous for its use of livin...
Functional analysis arose in the early twentieth century and gradually, conquering one stronghold after another, became a nearly universal mathematical doctrine, not merely a new area of mathematics, but a new mathematical world view. Its appearance was the inevitable consequence of the evolution of all of nineteenth-century mathematics, in particular classical analysis and mathematical physics. Its original basis was formed by Cantor’s theory of sets and linear algebra. Its existence answered the question of how to state general principles of a broadly interpreted analysis in a way suitable for the most diverse situations. A.M. Vershik ([45], p. 438). This text evolved from the content of...
Russian officials claim today that the USSR never possessed an offensive biological weapons program. In fact, the Soviet government spent billions of rubles and hard currency to fund a hugely expensive weapons program that added nothing to the country’s security. This history is the first attempt to understand the broad scope of the USSR’s offensive biological weapons research—its inception in the 1920s, its growth between 1970 and 1990, and its possible remnants in present-day Russia. We learn that the U.S. and U.K. governments never obtained clear evidence of the program’s closure from 1990 to the present day, raising the critical question whether the means for waging biological wa...
This volume highlights the potentials as well as the limits and challenges of human breath analysis and describes the current efforts made to advance this promising technology from bench to bed. Human breath analysis is a young, interdisciplinary and innovative research field aiming to provide a smart and non-invasive diagnostic tool, which can be used for screening, detecting and monitoring of diseases or metabolic disorders. This book presents different approaches for breath analysis including real-time and offline mass spectrometry as well as optical and semiconductor gas sensing methods. Besides, the role of smart algorithms to improve the performance of those technologies and the import...
From Aspirin to Viagra, insulin to penicillin, and vaccines to vitamin supplements, drugs have become part of our everyday lives. This staggering global industry wasn’t born overnight; advancements in pharmaceutical science have been happening for a long while, over the course of decades and even centuries. This book tells the history of ten prominent substances and how they came to be common household names. It shows how the creation of such influential drugs often began with the right person at the exactly right—or wrong!— time. The chapters tell the stories of geniuses and charlatans; scholars and amateurs; advances won through hard work or pure luck; and ultimately, the handful of resounding successes that revolutionized a global industry. Beyond the pioneers of the most famous drugs in our culture, the book analyzes how our perspective on medical treatment has shifted over the decades. Modern standards for testing and administering substances have created a new set of advantages, setbacks, and stigmas, all of which are discussed herein.
The history of inventions was born more than 10 centuries ago. 10,000 years of inventions and creations of the human being, of the so-called Homus Sapiens. This book traces the history of the most important inventions and discoveries that have happened throughout the centuries, this work defines in an extended and very complete way the definition of all those creations that some geniuses created in their day. From the most remote antiquity, those stone tools created in the era of the Cromagnon man, to the most advanced cybernetic and digital technologies of our time. As an author, I realized when writing this book, that although we think we know almost everything, we do not really know almost anything...
A timely examination of the use of disease and germs as a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) and the threat bioterrorism poses in an increasingly unpredictable and volatile future. This important, disturbing and timely book focuses on on the use of disease and germs as a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) and the threat bioterrorism poses in an increasingly unpredictable and volatile future for the world. For context it traces developments from the earliest primitive but effective days of infectious rams, poison-tipped arrows and plague-infected corpses used as toxic, disease-spreading projectiles, to the twenty-first-century industrial scale weaponization of biomedicine. Paul Chrystal shows how...
"For approaching two centuries, the images on postage stamps have been used to convey messages from the government of the day to the general public. Science has been used to enhance those messages for the past nine decades. In this book, I explore the ways in which science and scientists have been portrayed on stamps and look at the ideas and, in some cases, the propaganda that underpins them."--Page 1.
This “timely, topical, informative [and] exceptionally well written” history explores the impact of disease from prehistoric plagues to Covid-19 (Midwest Book Review). Historian Paul Chrystal charts how human civilization has grappled with successive pandemics, plagues, and epidemics across millennia. Ranging from prehistory to the present day, this volume begins by defining what constitutes a pandemic or epidemic, taking a close look at 20 historic examples: including cholera, influenza, bubonic plague, leprosy, measles, smallpox, malaria, AIDS, MERS, SARS, Zika, Ebola and, of course, Covid-19. Some less well-known, but equally significant and deadly contagions such as Legionnaires’ D...