|
Books > Language & Literature > Biography & autobiography > Science, technology & engineering
The riveting true story of John and Aileen Crowley's race to
find a cure for Pompe disease that inspired the movie Extraordinary
Measures
With three beautiful children, a new house, and financial
security, John and Aileen Crowley were on top of the world--until
their two youngest children, fifteen-month-old Megan and
five-month-old Patrick, were diagnosed with Pompe disease and given
only months to live. Refusing to accept a death sentence, John quit
his financial consultant job and invested his life savings in a
biotechnology start-up to research the disease and find a cure.
Battling scientific setbacks, conflict of interest accusations, and
business troubles, John and Aileen would be tested to their limits
as they valiantly fought, and succeeded, in finding revolutionary
new treatment for the disease--offering hope to Megan, Patrick, and
the many children and families affected by Pompe disease around the
world.
The inspiration for the captivating film Extraordinary Measures,
starring Brendan Fraser and Harrison Ford, The Cure is a remarkable
true story of cutting-edge science, business acumen and daring, and
one family's indomitable spirit.
Soon to be a major motion picture, the story of one of the most
improbable and productive collaborations ever chronicled, between a
young unschooled Indian prodigy and a great English mathematician.
In 1913, a young unschooled Indian clerk wrote a letter to G H
Hardy, begging the preeminent English mathematician's opinion on
several ideas he had about numbers. Realizing the letter was the
work of a genius, Hardy arranged for Srinivasa Ramanujan to come to
England. Thus began one of the most improbable and productive
collaborations ever chronicled. With a passion for rich and
evocative detail, Robert Kanigel takes us from the temples and
slums of Madras to the courts and chapels of Cambridge University,
where the devout Hindu Ramanujan, "the Prince of Intuition," tested
his brilliant theories alongside the sophisticated and eccentric
Hardy, "the Apostle of Proof." In time, Ramanujan's creative
intensity took its toll: he died at the age of thirty-two and left
behind a magical and inspired legacy that is still being plumbed
for its secrets today.
Filled with incident, discovery, and revelation, Dutch Light is a
vivid account of Christiaan Huygens's remarkable life and career,
but it is also nothing less than the story of the birth of modern
science as we know it. Europe's greatest scientist during the
latter half of the seventeenth century, Christiaan Huygens was a
true polymath. A towering figure in the fields of astronomy,
optics, mechanics, and mathematics, many of his innovations in
methodology, optics and timekeeping remain in use to this day.
Among his many achievements, he developed the theory of light
travelling as a wave, invented the mechanism for the pendulum
clock, and discovered the rings of Saturn - via a telescope that he
had also invented. A man of fashion and culture, Christiaan came
from a family of multi-talented individuals whose circle included
not only leading figures of Dutch society, but also artists and
philosophers such as Rembrandt, Locke and Descartes. The Huygens
family and their contemporaries would become key actors in the
Dutch Golden Age, a time of unprecedented intellectual expansion
within the Netherlands. Set against a backdrop of worldwide
religious and political turmoil, this febrile period was defined by
danger, luxury and leisure, but also curiosity, purpose, and
tremendous possibility. Following in Huygens's footsteps as he
navigates this era while shuttling opportunistically between
countries and scientific disciplines, Hugh Aldersey-Williams builds
a compelling case to reclaim Huygens from the margins of history
and acknowledge him as one of our most important and influential
scientific figures.
Of the three physicians at the Battle of the Little Big Horn,
Doctor George Edwin Lord (1846-76) was the lone commissioned
medical officer, an assistant surgeon with the United States Army's
7th Cavalry-one more soldier caught up in the U.S. government's
efforts to fulfill what many people believed was the young
country's "Manifest Destiny." A Life Cut Short at the Little Big
Horn tells Lord's story for the first time. Notable for its unique
angle on Custer's last stand and for its depiction of frontier-era
medicine, the book is above all a compelling portrait of the making
of an army medical professional in mid-nineteenth-century America.
Drawing on newly discovered documents, Todd E. Harburn describes
Lord's education and training at Bowdoin College in Maine and the
Chicago Medical College, detailing what the study of medicine
entailed at the time for "a young man of promise . . . held in
universal esteem." Lord's time as a contract physician with the
army took him in 1874 to the U.S. Northern Boundary Survey. From
there Harburn recounts how, after a failed romance and the rigors
of the U.S. Army Medical Board examination, the young doctor
proceeded to his first-and only-appointment as a post surgeon, at
Fort Buford in Dakota Territory. What followed, of course, was
Lord's service, and his death, in the Little Big Horn campaign,
which this book shows us for the first time from the unique
perspective of the surgeon. A portrait of a singular figure in the
milieu of the American military's nineteenth-century medical elite,
A Life Cut Short at the Little Big Horn offers a close look at a
familiar chapter in U.S. history, and a reminder of the humanity
lost in a battle that resonates to this day.
|
You may like...
Elon Musk
Walter Isaacson
Hardcover
R590
R472
Discovery Miles 4 720
|