Transforming American Science documents the ways in which federal funds catalyzed or accelerated changes in both university culture and the broader system of American higher education during the post-World War II decades. The events of the book lie within the context of the Cold War, when pressure to maintain parity with the Soviet Union impelled more generous government spending and a willingness of some universities to reorient their missions in the service of country and of science. The book draws upon a substantial amount of archival research conducted in various university archives (MIT, Berkeley, Stanford) as well as at the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and various presidential libraries. Author Jonathan Engel considers the repurposing of the wartime Manhattan Engineering District and the Office of Naval Research to robust peacetime roles in supporting the nation's expanding research efforts, along with the birth of the National Science Foundation, space exploration, and atoms for peace among other topics. This volume is the perfect resource for all those interested in Cold War history and in the history of American science and technology policy.

This book presents contributions from the Workshop on Rare Isotopes and Fundamental Symmetries, which was held on September 1922, 2007, at the Institute for Nuclear Theory at the University of Washington. The book is the fourth in a series dedicated to exploring the science important to the proposed Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB). The topics covered by the contributions include Fermi beta decay, electron-neutrino correlations in nuclear beta decay: precision mass measurements, atomic parity violation, electric dipole moments, and hadronic parity violation and anapole moments.

These topics highlight the recent work on the use of nuclei to understand the fundamental symmetries of nature. It presents current results as well as proposals for future experiments.

The diet and weight-loss industry is worth $66 billion - billion!! The estimated annual health care costs of obesity-related illness are 190 billion or nearly 21% of annual medical spending in the United States. But how did we get here? Is this a battle we can't win? What changes need to be made in order to scale back the incidence of obesity in the US, and, indeed, around the world? Here, Jonathan Engel reviews the sources of the problem and offers the science behind our modern propensity toward obesity. He offers a plan for helping address the problem, but admits that it is, indeed, an uphill battle. Nevertheless, given the magnitude of the costs in years of life and vigor lost, it is a battle worth fighting. Fat Nation is a social history of obesity in the United States since the second World War. In confronting this familiar topic from a historical perspective, Jonathan Engel attempts to show that obesity is a symptom of complex changes that have transpired over the past half century to our food, our living habits, our life patterns, our built environments, and our social interactions. He offers readers solid grounding in the known science underlying obesity (genetic set points, complex endocrine feedback loops, neurochemical messengering) but then makes the novel argument that obesity is a result of the interaction of our genes with our environment. That is, our bodies have always been programmed to become obese, but until recently never had the opportunity to do so. Now, with cheap calories ubiquitous (particularly in the form of sucrose), unwalkable physical spaces, deteriorating rituals and norms surrounding eating, and the withering of cooking skills, nearly every American daily confronts the challenge of not putting on weight. Given the outcomes, though, for those who are obese, Engel encourages us to address the problems and offers suggestions to help remedy the problem.

From Freud to Zoloft, the first comprehensive history of American Psychotherapy
Fifty percent of Americans will undergo some form of psychotherapy in their lifetimes, but the origins of the field are rarely known to patients. Yet the story of psychotherapy in America brims with colorful characters, intriguing experimental treatments, and intense debates within this community of healers.
"American Therapy" begins, as psychotherapy itself does, with the monumental figure of Sigmund Freud. The book outlines the basics of Freudian theory and discusses the peculiarly powerful influence of Freud on the world of American mental health. The book moves through the emergence of group therapy, the rise of psychosurgery, the evolution of uniquely American therapies such as Gestalt, rebirthing, and primal scream therapy, and concludes with the modern world of psychopharmacology, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and highly targeted short-term therapies.
For a counseled nation that freely uses terms such as aemotional baggagea and no longer stigmatizes mental health care, "American Therapy" is a remarkable history of an extraordinary enterprise.

Jonathan Engel traces the policy debates over healthcare delivery, and the ways of paying for it, that were conducted during the second quarter of the twentieth century in the United States. Examining the views advanced by doctors, including those unallied with the American Medical Association's position, as well as by "reformers" -- academics, public health officers, philanthropists, foundation executives, and independent scholars -- Engel displays how the discussion involved much more than the legislative efforts of New Deal Democrats regarding health insurance.

Under discussion were group care, industrial health plans, nationalized hospitals, and public dispensaries. Engel's attention to the letters and other writings of key participants in the debates enriches his account, with the papers of Morris Fishbein, the president of the AMA, Michael Davis, a researcher for the Julius Rosenwald Foundation, and I. S. Falk, the research director for the Social Security Administration, adding concrete detail. His investigation demonstrates that physicians' reactions to legislative remedies were not monolithic. It also shows that foundation leaders were instrumental in enlisting organized labor, farmers, and liberal legislators in the improvement of the "world's best" medical care, and that the discussion was more than a debate between political foes. Participants in the debates discovered no simple solution to the challenges they explored, however, and their positions above all foreshadow the debate of succeeding decades.