A Pauling biography

Walter Reed. A biography

WILLIAM B. BEAN, Walter Reed. A biography, Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1982, 8vo, pp. xiv, 190, $12.95. I enjoyed reading Dr Bean's life of Walter Reed. Its style and content fall somewhere between the writings of Paul de Kruif and Gwyn Macfarlane's life of Howard Florey. In fact, there are striking resemblances to Macfarlane's book, as the author has been to enormous trouble...

Harvey Cushing, A Biography

The physician of today may be somewhat bewildered in the face of the vast current literature on penicillin and the conflicting views on methods of administration, dosages, and indications. Dr. Fleming and his 28 associates have now provided a most authoritative and yet practical guide-book concerning the place of this agent in medicine. No one will deny that much remains to be learned of penici...

Pauling s Left-Handed a-Helix

proposed there was the a-helix. Its formulation was the first and is still one of the greatest triumphs of speculative model building in molecular biology; it is the forerunner of the vast investment in computer-assisted molecular modeling in present-day research in structural chemistry. Nowadays, almost everyone is aware that the a-helix is right-handed (that is to say, if the thumb of the rig...

The Nicolai case. A biography

xix). Despite a tendency to interpretative ad hoc-ism, it does bring together the important monographic work (e.g. Bynum, Searle, Stocking, Young) that has been done, and in some instances offers perceptive independent readings of particular figures. One might quarrel with the decision to focus on the natural sciences in isolation from the social (and the failure adequately to appreciate the wa...

Sir Christopher Wren. A biography