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At the outset of the twentieth century, malaria was Italy's major public health problem. It was the cause of low productivity, poverty, and economic backwardness, while it also stunted literacy, limited political participation, and undermined the army. This book recounts how Italy became the world center for the development of malariology as a medical discipline and launched the first national campaign to eradicate the disease. The book traces the early advances, the setbacks of world wars and Fascist dictatorship, and the final victory against malaria after World War II. It shows how the medical and teaching professions helped educate people in their own self-defense and in the process expanded trade unionism, women's consciousness, and civil liberties. It also discusses the antimalarial effort under Mussolini's regime and reveals the shocking details of the German army's intentional release of malaria among Italian civilians—the first and only known example of bioterror in twentieth-century Europe.

Discovering Tuberculosis looks at key places, developments, and ideas in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that explain the staying power of tuberculosis in both the past and the present: First, a probing look at race and TB in east Africa, South Africa, and American Indian country from the turn of the twentieth century to World War II; next, from the “Golden Age of Medicine” in the years just before and the three decades after the war, a detailed exploration of the development and rollout of a nearly useless vaccine on American Indian reservations and in India, followed by a cautionary tale of the development of drug-resistant tuberculosis in Kenya and elsewhere; and finally, the tragic story of the resurgence of TB in the era of HIV/AIDS. Even though racial explanations for the disease’s prevalence have been cast aside, the world’s largest vaccine campaign was launched, antibiotics that cure the disease have been developed, and the effects of HIV on TB have been accurately predicted, Discovering Tuberculosis makes clear that the considerable effort put into combating the disease has never been enough to overwhelm this still powerful killer.

In the decades since the mid-1970s, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, has led the quest to explore the farthest reaches of the solar system. JPL spacecraft, including the Voyager, Magellan, Galileo, and the Mars rovers, have brought the planets into close view. JPL satellites and instruments also shed new light on the structure and dynamics of earth itself, while their orbiting observatories opened new vistas on the cosmos. This book recounts the extraordinary story of the lab's accomplishments, failures, and evolution from 1976 to the present day. This history of JPL encompasses far more than the story of the events and individuals that have shaped the institution. It also engages wider questions about relations between civilian and military space programs, the place of science and technology in American politics, and the impact of the work at JPL on the way we imagine the place of humankind in the universe.

This book tells the extraordinary yet unheralded history of monoclonal antibodies. Often referred to as Mabs, they are unfamiliar to most nonscientists, yet these microscopic protein molecules are everywhere, quietly shaping our lives and healthcare. Discovered in the mid-1970s in the laboratory where Watson and Crick had earlier unveiled the structure of DNA, Mabs have radically changed understandings of the pathways of disease. They have enabled faster, cheaper, and more accurate clinical diagnostic testing on a vast scale. And they have played a fundamental role in pharmaceutical innovation, leading to such developments as recombinant interferon and insulin, and personalized drug therapies such as Herceptin. Today Mabs constitute six of the world's top ten blockbuster drugs and make up a third of new introduced treatments. This text recounts the risks and opposition that a daring handful of individuals faced while discovering and developing Mabs, and it addresses the related scientific, medical, technological, business, and social challenges that arose. The book offers a saga of entrepreneurs whose persistence and creativity ultimately changed the healthcare landscape and brought untold relief to millions of patients. Even so, as the book shows, controversies over Mabs remain, and it examines current debates over the costs and effectiveness of these innovative drugs.

The early years of the twenty-first century have seen the rise to prominence of private-sector American spaceflight. The result is a new phase of space development—one where human spaceflight is no longer the exclusive domain of governments, but an activity increasingly driven by the interests and motivations of individuals and corporations. In order to understand this phenomenon, we need to examine the long-run economic history of American space exploration. This book examines three critical phases of that history. The first phase is the financing and construction of American astronomical observatories from Colonial America to the middle of the twentieth century. The second is the career of Robert Goddard, the American father of liquid-fuel rocketry, whose efforts constituted the world’s first spaceflight development program. The third is the American political history of the Cold War ‘Space Race’ and subsequent NASA human spaceflight initiatives in the twentieth century. Examining these episodes from an economic perspective results in a new view of American space exploration—one where personal initiative and private funding have been dominant long-run trends, where the demand for impressive public signals has funded large space exploration projects across two centuries, and where government leadership in the field is a relatively recent phenomenon.

This book presents convincing evidence that Dutch commerce—not religion—inspired the rise of science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The book scrutinizes a wealth of historical documents relating to the study of medicine and natural history in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe, Brazil, South Africa, and Asia during this era. It uncovers direct links between the rise of trade and commerce in the Dutch Empire and the flourishing of scientific investigation. The book argues that engaging in commerce changed the thinking of Dutch citizens, leading to a new emphasis on such values as objectivity, accumulation, and description. The preference for accurate information that accompanied the rise of commerce also laid the groundwork for the rise of science globally, wherever the Dutch engaged in trade. Medicine and natural history were fundamental aspects of this new science, as reflected in the development of gardens for both pleasure and botanical study, anatomical theaters, curiosity cabinets, and richly illustrated books about nature.

Medicine played an important role in the early secularization and eventual modernization of German Jewish culture. As both physicians and patients, Jews exerted a great influence on the formation of modern medical discourse and practice. This book investigates the relationship between German Jews and medicine from medieval times until its demise under the Nazis. The book examines the rise of the German Jewish physician in the Middle Ages and his emergence as a new kind of secular, Jewish intellectual in the early modern period and beyond. It shows how nineteenth-century medicine regarded Jews as possessing distinct physical and mental pathologies, which in turn led to the emergence in modern Germany of the “Jewish body” as a cultural and scientific idea. The book demonstrates why Jews flocked to the medical profession in Germany and Austria, noting that by 1933, 50 percent of Berlin's and 60 percent of Vienna's physicians were Jewish. It discusses the impact of this on Jewish and German culture, concluding with the fate of Jewish doctors under the Nazis, whose assault on them was designed to eliminate whatever intimacy had been built up between Germans and their Jewish doctors over the centuries.

This book studies medieval notions of the heart to explore the “lost circulations” of an era when individual lives and bodies were defined by their extensions into the world rather than as self-perpetuating, self-limited entities. Drawing from the works of Dante, Catherine of Siena, Boccaccio, Aquinas, and Cavalcanti, as well as other literary, philosophic, and scientific texts, the book reveals medieval answers to such fundamental questions as: Where is life located? Of what does it consist? Where does it begin? How does it end? Against the modern idea of the isolated self, the medieval heart provides a model for rethinking the body's relationship to the world it inhabits.

In 1957, two young scientists, Matthew Meselson and Frank Stahl, produced a landmark experiment confirming that DNA replicates as predicted by the double helix structure Watson and Crick had recently proposed. It also gained immediate renown as a “most beautiful” experiment whose beauty was tied to its simplicity. Yet the investigative path that led to the experiment was anything but simple. This book vividly reconstructs the complex route that led to the Meselson-Stahl experiment and provides an inside view of day-to-day scientific research—its unpredictability, excitement, intellectual challenge, and serendipitous windfalls, as well as its frustrations, unexpected diversions away from original plans, and chronic uncertainty. The text uses research logs, experimental films, correspondence, and interviews with the participants to record the history of Meselson and Stahl's research, from their first thinking about the problem through the publication of their dramatic results. It also reviews the scientific community's reception of the experiment, the experiment's influence on later investigations, and the reasons for its reputation as an exceptionally beautiful experiment.

This book presents a history of the development of child study during the early part of the twentieth century. Most nineteenth-century scientists deemed children unsuitable subjects for study, and parents were hostile to the idea. By 1935, however, the study of the child was a thriving scientific and professional field. This book shows how interrelated movements—both social and scientific—combined to transform the study of the child. Drawing on nationwide archives and extensive interviews with child study pioneers, the book recounts the role of social reformers, philanthropists, and progressive scientists, who established new institutions with new ways of studying children. Part history of science and part social history, this book describes a fascinating era when the normal child was studied for the first time, from which a child guidance movement emerged, and the newly created federal Children's Bureau conducted pathbreaking sociological studies of children.