How biomedical research using various animal species and in vitro cellular systems has resulted in both major successes and translational failure. In Model Systems in Biology, comparative neurobiologist Georg Striedter examines how biomedical researchers have used animal species and in vitro cellular systems to understand and develop treatments for human diseases ranging from cancer and poli…
The groundbreaking first book by a major evolutionary biologist, published in 1912, that anticipated current thinking about organismal complexity. Julian Huxley's The Individual in the Animal Kingdom, published in 1912, is a concise and groundbreaking work that is almost entirely unknown today. In it, Huxley analyzes the evolutionary advances in life's organizational complexity, anticipating…
Contributors explore common elements in the evolutionary histories of both human and insect agriculture resulting from convergent evolution. During the past 12,000 years, agriculture originated in humans as many as twenty-three times, and during the past 65 million years, agriculture also originated in nonhuman animals at least twenty times and in insects at least fifteen times. It is much m…
How intermittent fasting can enhance resilience, improve mental and physical performance, and protect against aging and disease. Most of us eat three meals a day with a smattering of snacks because we think that's the normal, healthy way to eat. This book shows why that's not the case. The human body and brain evolved to function well in environments where food could be obtained only intermi…
An authority on Alzheimer's disease offers a history of past failures and a roadmap that points us in a new direction in our journey to a cure. For decades, some of our best and brightest medical scientists have dedicated themselves to finding a cure for Alzheimer's disease. What happened? Where is the cure? The biggest breakthroughs occurred twenty-five years ago, with little progress since…
How engineered materials and machines powered by living biological cells can tackle technological challenges in medicine, agriculture, and global security. You are a biological machine whose movement is powered by skeletal muscle, just as a car is a machine whose movement is powered by an engine. If you can be built from the bottom up with biological materials, other machines can be as well.…
A science writer and recreational runner explores the science behind popularly held beliefs about shoes, injuries, nutrition, “runner's high,” and more. Conventional wisdom about running is passed down like folklore (and sometimes contradicts itself): the right kind of shoe prevents injury—or running barefoot, like our prehistoric ancestors, is best; eat a high-fat diet—and also carb…
What contemporary prostate angst tells us about how we understand masculinity, aging, and sexuality. We are all suffering an acute case of prostate angst. Men worry about their own prostates and those of others close to them; women worry about the prostates of the men they love. The prostate—a gland located directly under the bladder—lurks on the periphery of many men's health issues, bu…
An examination of the contemporary medicalization of death and dying that calls us to acknowledge death's existential and emotional realities. Death is a natural, inevitable, and deeply human process, and yet Western medicine tends to view it as a medical failure. In their zeal to prevent death, physicians and hospitals often set patients and their families on a seemingly unstoppable traject…
How the very fact of being human makes us vulnerable to pandemics—and gives us the power to save ourselves. The COVID-19 pandemic won't be our last—because what makes us vulnerable to pandemics also makes us human. That is the uncomfortable but all-too-timely message of The Human Disease, which travels through history and around the globe to examine how and why pandemics are an inescapab…