By Science Books
Sunday, November 25, 2007

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

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."

-- Susan P. Williams

Scientists who study the cosmos generally agree that it began with the Big Bang -- an incomprehensibly powerful moment roughly 14 billion years ago when matter, energy and space sprang from an unknowable "singularity." But what, if anything, preceded that moment? The reigning theory is that time itself began with the Big Bang.

Princeton University astrophysicist Paul Steinhardt and Cambridge University mathematical physicist Neil Turok disagree, proposing a quite complicated and thought-provoking alternative: Ours is not the only universe, and a potentially infinite number of others have been created through infinite time. Using some of the insights of string theory and quantum physics, they describe a scenario where Big Bangs occur routinely (if at intervals of billions of years) when as yet unidentified and unseen dimensions collide.

While the book was written for a general audience, it is hardly easy reading. Nonetheless, for those intrigued by how two respected physicists came to their revolutionary views, it is worth the effort.

-- Marc Kaufman

Charles Lindbergh was just 25 years old when, in 1927, he became the first person to fly from New York to Paris. But the rest of Lindbergh's life was dominated by an even loftier ambition: a quest for not just cultural but also biological immortality.

David M. Friedman contends that Lindbergh's genius for engine repair inspired in him an intensely mechanical view of the body and a belief that people could live almost indefinitely if old parts could be swapped out for newer ones.

Lindbergh's fame gained him an introduction in 1930 to Alexis Carrel, the first American scientist to win a Nobel Prize and a pioneer in the laboratory cultivation of tissues and organs. The two became lifelong collaborators, designing ever better systems for keeping organs alive outside the body. They also fed each other's eugenic views, which grew into disturbingly sympathetic takes on Hitler's vision of a superior race.

Friedman's depiction of Lindbergh as a single-minded immortalist is at times two-dimensional, and his implication that the famed pilot ultimately transcended his racist leanings is less than convincing. But the story reveals a fascinating side of a man underappreciated for his scientific talent and philosophical complexity. ¿

-- Rick Weiss

The reviewers are on The Post's science staff.