Reading list · 12 books

Biographies of people who saved millions

The wheat breeder, the vaccinators, the chemists in wartime Oxford: the lives behind the biggest falls in the death rate.

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Biography

The Man Who Fed the World (opens Bookshop.org)

Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Norman Borlaug and His Battle to End World Hunger

Leon Hesser · 2006

Leon Hesser worked alongside Norman Borlaug and tells how the wheat breeder's dwarf varieties, bred in Mexico and carried to India and Pakistan, averted famine in the 1960s.
Biography

Polio (opens Bookshop.org)

An American Story

David M. Oshinsky · 2005

Oshinsky's Pulitzer Prize winning history follows Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin and the March of Dimes from the epidemics of the early 1950s to the 1955 vaccine trial.
Biography

The Mold in Dr. Florey's Coat (opens Bookshop.org)

The Story of the Penicillin Miracle

Eric Lax · 2004

Eric Lax tells how Howard Florey, Ernst Chain and Norman Heatley turned Fleming's mold into a usable drug in wartime Oxford, working with scarce equipment.
Firsthand account

Smallpox (opens Bookshop.org)

The Death of a Disease: The Inside Story of Eradicating a Worldwide Killer

Donald A. Henderson · 2009

Donald Henderson ran the WHO campaign that ended smallpox, and this is his own account of the vaccinators, the logistics and the last natural case in Somalia in 1977.
Firsthand account

House on Fire (opens Bookshop.org)

The Fight to Eradicate Smallpox

William H. Foege · 2011

William Foege, who devised the surveillance and containment strategy that finished smallpox, recounts the field campaign in Nigeria, India and elsewhere from his own experience.
Biography

The Doctors' Plague (opens Bookshop.org)

Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis

Sherwin B. Nuland · 2003

Surgeon Sherwin Nuland tells how Semmelweis showed in 1847 Vienna that handwashing stopped childbed fever, and how colleagues rejected him.
Biography

The Ghost Map (opens Bookshop.org)

The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

Steven Johnson · 2006

Steven Johnson reconstructs the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak, where physician John Snow and curate Henry Whitehead traced deaths to a single water pump.
Biography

The Discovery of Insulin (opens Bookshop.org)

Michael Bliss · 1982

Historian Michael Bliss reconstructs how Frederick Banting, Charles Best, J. J. R. Macleod and James Collip produced insulin in Toronto in 1921 and 1922, and how they quarreled over credit.
Biography

Vaccinated (opens Bookshop.org)

One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases

Paul A. Offit · 2007

Vaccinologist Paul Offit profiles Maurice Hilleman, the Merck scientist behind roughly forty vaccines, including those for measles, mumps, hepatitis B and chickenpox.
Firsthand account

Breaking Through (opens Bookshop.org)

My Life in Science

Katalin Karikó · 2023

Katalin Karikó describes her path from communist Hungary to Penn, years of rejected grants, and the modified mRNA work that led to the COVID-19 vaccines and a 2023 Nobel Prize.
Biography

Mountains Beyond Mountains (opens Bookshop.org)

The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

Tracy Kidder · 2003

Tracy Kidder follows physician Paul Farmer from rural Haiti to Peru and Russia as he builds Partners In Health and treats drug-resistant tuberculosis among the poor.
Biography

The Demon Under the Microscope (opens Bookshop.org)

From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug

Thomas Hager · 2006

Thomas Hager tells how Gerhard Domagk and the Bayer laboratories found the first antibacterial sulfa drug in the 1930s, before penicillin arrived.