Looking at the personalities behind scientific advances.

VACCINATED One Man's Quest to Defeat The World's Deadliest DiseasesBy Paul A. Offit Smithsonian. 254 pp. $26.95

You know about Jonas Salk. You know about Albert Sabin. You may even know about Edward Jenner, who more than 200 years ago concocted the first vaccine -- a shot against smallpox made from cow pus. But you probably never heard of Maurice Hilleman. And author Paul Offit, head of infectious diseases at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, makes a convincing case that this is a grave omission.

Hilleman was directly responsible for many of the vaccines that save millions of lives every year, including those that prevent measles and German measles, hepatitis A and B, mumps and chicken pox.

Hilleman, who died in 2005 at the age of 85, spent most of his career at Merck & Co., where he was a fanatical worker. When U.S. troops began dying of Japanese encephalitis in 1944, he oversaw the churning of 30,000 mouse brains per day in blenders, producing enough vaccine to protect 600,000 troops in just three months. When his 5-year-old got mumps in 1963, he swabbed her throat and drove to the lab in the middle of the night to grow the virus, from which he later made the first mumps vaccine.

But Hilleman had little tolerance for lesser beings (unimpressed by one scientist's talk at a meeting, he began loudly clipping his own nails). And any lingering hint of sainthood dissolves as Offit reveals Hilleman's lack of compunction about using mentally retarded children and pregnant prisoners as guinea pigs for his experimental shots.

Hilleman once said, "On the outside I appeared to be a bastard but . . . if you looked deeper, inside, you still saw bastard." A bastard, perhaps, but one who made a healthier world.

-- Rick Weiss

FAUST IN COPENHAGEN A Struggle for the Soul of PhysicsBy Gino Segr¿ Viking. 310 pp. $25.95

Gino Segr¿, a theoretical physicist at the University of Pennsylvania, relates how scientists discovered the inner workings of the atom. But what really propel this book are his insights into quantum theorists' lives -- their attractions, repulsions, pairings and collisions as Hitler rose to power and war loomed over Europe.

Segr¿'s narrative hinges on a gathering of brilliant, young physicists in Denmark in 1932. They put on a skit, written mainly by Max Delbr¿ck and based on Goethe's "Faust," in which Wolfgang Pauli (playing Mephistopheles) and Niels Bohr (the Lord) argued for possession of the soul of Paul Ehrenfest (Faust). The skit was intended as comic relief, but, as Segr¿ notes, it was also prescient: "In those troubling political currents that characterized the early 1930s, physicists realized they might be called on to make some Faustian bargains in their personal lives, but they consoled themselves with the thought that their science was pure, abstract, with no dangerous unintended consequences. . . . A decade later, as the full power of the atomic nucleus was unleashed, they would see how wrong they had been."