Search results for ""Author Luba Vikhanski""

Around Christmas of 1882, while peering through a microscope at starfish larvae in which he had inserted tiny thorns, Russian zoologist Elie Metchnikoff had a brilliant insight: what if the mobile cells he saw gathering around the thorns were nothing but a healing force in action? Metchnikoff’s daring theory of immunity—that voracious cells he called phagocytes formed the first line of defense against invading bacteria—would eventually earn the scientist a Nobel Prize, shared with his archrival, as well as the unofficial moniker “Father of Natural Immunity.” But first he had to win over skeptics, especially those who called his theory “an oriental fairy tale.”Using previously inaccessible archival materials, author Luba Vikhanski chronicles Metchnikoff’s remarkable life and discoveries in the first moder n biography of this hero of medicine. Metchnikoff was a towering figure in the scientific community of the early twentieth century, a tireless humanitarian who, while working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, also strived to curb the spread of cholera, syphilis, and other deadly diseases. In his later years, he startled the world with controversial theories on longevity, launching a global craze for yogurt, and pioneered research into gut microbes and aging. Though Metchnikoff was largely forgotten for nearly a hundred years, Vikhanski documents a remarkable revival of interest in his ideas on immunity and on the gut flora in the science of the twenty-first century.

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This timely manifesto calls for a future free from gender-based assumptions about human potential. Written by the internationally renowned neuroscientist whose game-changing research debunks the myth of male and female brains.For generations we''ve been taught that women and men differ in profound ways. Women are supposedly more sensitive and cooperative, whereas men are more aggressive and sexual because this or that region in the brains of women is larger or smaller than in the brains of men, or because they have more or less of this or that hormone. This story seems to provide us with a neat biological explanation for much of what we encounter in day-to-day life. It''s even sometimes used to explain why, for example, most teachers are women and most engineers are men. But is it true? Using the ground-breaking results from her own lab and from other recent studies, neuroscientist Daphna Joel shows that it is not. In

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