The Pill, Pygmy Chimps, and Degas' Horse by Carl Djerassi (129,000 words; 26 illustrations)This unusually wide-ranging memoir, moving from Europe to America, academia to industry, science to art, triumph to tragedy, is the idiosyncratic life story of Carl Djerassi, teenage refugee from Nazism and prodigiously gifted chemist who experimented with a local yam in Mexico, synthesized steroids and, along with Gregory Pincus and John Rock, fathered the birth control pill...

When Professor Isidore Cantor reveals his latest breakthrough in cancer research, his promising research fellow, Dr. Jeremiah Stafford, has only to conduct the experiment and win Cantor the Nobel prize. But how far will Stafford go to guarantee the results? Carl Djerassi draws from his career as a world-famous scientist to describe the fierce competition driving scientific superstars in this gripping novel.

This book features a CD of rarely performed music, including a specially commissioned rap by Erik Weiner of Walter Benjamin's "Thesis on the Philosophy of History."Theodor W. Adorno was the prototypical German Jewish non-Jew, Walter Benjamin vacillated between German Jew and Jewish German, Gershom Scholem was a committed Zionist, and Arnold Schönberg converted to Protestantism for professional reasons but later returned to Judaism. Carl Djerassi, himself a refugee from Hit...

October 15, 1951 marks the birthday of one of the key episodes in 20th century social history: the first synthesis of a steroid oral contraceptive in a small laboratory in Mexico City - an event that triggered the development of the Pill. Carl Djerassi has been honoured worldwide for that accomplishment, which ultimately changed the life of women and the nature of human reproduction in ways that were not foreseeable. On the 50th anniversary of this pivotal event, Djerassi weaves a compelli...

”What purpose is served by showing that England's greatest natural philosopher is flawed … like other mortals?” asks one of the characters in Newton's Darkness. “We need unsullied heroes!” But what if the hero is sullied? At stake is an issue that is as germane today as it was 300 years ago: a scientist's ethics must not be divorced from scientific accomplishments. There is probably no other scientist of whom so many biographies and other historical analyses have been published than Isaac ...

This book examines the questions “What can science do for the theatre?” and “What can the theatre do for science?” which raise challenges for both theatre professionals and scientists. Unusually, this book deals with plays first and foremost as reading material — as texts to be read alone or in dramatic readings — rather than emphasizing performances on the stage. Concrete examples are given to demonstrate the potential pedagogic value of using the dialogic style and plot structure of play...

Dr. Melanie Laidlaw is a scientist developing the first use of ICSI, short for intracytoplasmic sperm injection. Her collaborator, Dr. Felix Frankenthaler, turns out to have his own ideas about how to implement their new procedure. The wild card is Melanie’s new lover, Menachem Dvir, a fellow scientist. This darkly comic menage-a-tois plays out not only in bedrooms and labs, but also in test tubes and under the microscope. A Brave New World indeed!Includes an interview with Liza Mu...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a documentary from Ken Burns on PBS, this New York Times bestseller is “an extraordinary achievement” (The New Yorker)—a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence.Now includes an excerpt from Siddhartha Mukher...

The #1 NEW YORK TIMES BestsellerThe basis for the PBS Ken Burns Documentary The Gene: An Intimate HistoryNow includes an excerpt from Siddhartha Mukherjee**’**s new book Song of the Cell!From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies—a fascinating history of the gene and “a magisterial account of how human minds have laboriously, ingen...

From New York Times bestselling author Sam Kean comes incredible stories of science, history, language, and music, as told by our own DNA.In The Disappearing Spoon, bestselling author Sam Kean unlocked the mysteries of the periodic table. In The Violinist's Thumb, he explores the wonders of the magical building block of life: DNA.There are genes to explain crazy cat ladies, why other people have no fingerprints, and why some peopl...

Why has the "War on Cancer" languished, focusing mainly on finding and treating the disease and downplaying the need to control and combat cancer's basic causes -- tobacco, the workplace, radiation, and the general environment? This war has targeted the wrong enemies with the wrong weapons, failing to address well-known cancer causes.As epidemiologist Devra Davis shows in this superbly researched expose, this is no accident. The War on Cancer has followed the commercial in...

A highly regarded scientist’s examination of the battle between evolution and intelligent design, and its implications for how science is practiced in America.