Like reading about the life of your grandfather, if your grandfather happened to have a hand in the development of vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, pneumococcus, meningococcus, and
Haemophilus influenzae type b. An account of the life of Maurice Hilleman, a leading vaccine researcher and ultimately head of the Merck Institute of Vaccinology. This book also provides a succinct discussion of the development and use of vaccines, their public health impact, and surrounding ethical questions.
An amazing fact I didn't know: In the early 1960s measles killed 8 million children every year. It still kills 500,000 children a year.
Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases
Paul A. Offit
2007
Available from
Amazon
Prescient analysis of the impending credit crisis. At times a bit technical - I had to think very hard to understand all the financial machinations - but really interesting. He is pessimistic about the immediate economic outlook but has ideas about how the financial system can be righted over the longer term.
An analysis of the science behind complementary and alternative medicine written by the former director of research at the Univesity of Maryland's NIH-funded Complementary Medicine Program. This is a fascinating book to read if you have a chronic medical condition and try, from time to time, to find something to treat it. It explains how the placebo effect and its cousins - reversion to the mean, natural history, and so on - trick us into believing that ineffective treatments are effective. This book is also a great reference for scientists, especially social scientists, trying to design good studies and evaluate the quality of published works. It will make me a much more skeptical, and reasoned, consumer of the science press and medical treatments.
Alison Rogers quits her job as a real estate journalist to get a real estate license and start flipping property. It doesn’t work out how she planned, and she ends up being a regular real estate broker in New York City. I don’t know anything about real estate, so this book was interesting as an insight into what realtors do, how they make money, what service they provide. She’s a chatty, friendly guide to the business.
