‘A riveting book … In combining the passion of Robert Macfarlane with the incisiveness of Patrick Radden Keefe, Shaw has announced himself as a brilliant new voice in science writing’ RACHEL CLARKE, SPECTATOR**A SUNDAY TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025**Antibiotics are one of humanity’s greatest achievements but our access to them is under threat. Discover their miraculous history – and how we confront their uncertain future.

**Brought to you by Penguin.Antibiotics: one of humanity’s greatest achievements – but invented by microbes.**An epic narrative of discovery and innovation – but also of extraction and exploitation.This is the spellbinding story of how we have burned through the fossil fuels of medicine.Since their advent, antibiotics have saved millions of lives, marking one of the greatest medical advances in our history. Dangerous Mir...

LONGLISTED FOR THE FINANCIAL TIMES AND SCHRODERS BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD"One of those books that changes the way you see the world. Gripping, urgent, important."ED CONWAY"This wonderful book is as welcome as it is overdue ... shines a much-needed light on this essential topic."RORY SUTHERLAND"A deftly written tale."LEWIS BASTON

Winner of the 2023 PROSE Award for Excellence in Biological and Life Sciences and the 2023 Chautauqua Prize!Named a New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by The Economist, Oprah Daily, BookPage, Book Riot, the New York Public Library, and more!In The Song of the Cell, the extraordinary author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Emperor of All Maladies and ...

A profound, human history of biology’s most vital idea.From the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies comes a sweeping exploration of the cell – the building block of all living things. In The Song of the Cell, Siddhartha Mukherjee traces how centuries of scientific endeavour and discovery, from early microscopes to stem-cell therapy, have transformed medicine and our understanding of what it means to be alive.

Happy Accidents is a fascinating, entertaining, and highly accessible look at the surprising role serendipity has played in some of the most important medical discoveries in the twentieth century. What do penicillin, chemotherapy drugs, X-rays, Valium, the Pap smear, and Viagra have in common? They were each discovered accidentally, stumbled upon in the search for something else. In the 1990s, Pfizer had high hopes for a new drug that would boost blood flow to the heart. As they c...

"In Missing Microbes, Martin Blaser sounds [an] alarm. He patiently and thoroughly builds a compelling case that the threat of antibiotic overuse goes far beyond resistant infections."— NatureRenowned microbiologist Dr. Martin J. Blaser invites us into the wilds of the human microbiome, where for hundreds of thousands of years bacterial and human cells have existed in a peaceful symbiosis that is responsible for the equilibrium and health of our bo...

The surprising, behind-the-scenes story of how our medicines are discovered, told by a veteran drug hunter.The search to find medicines is as old as disease, which is to say as old as the human race. Through serendipity- by chewing, brewing, and snorting-some Neolithic souls discovered opium, alcohol, snakeroot, juniper, frankincense, and other helpful substances. Ötzi the Iceman, the five-thousand-year-old hunter frozen in the Italian Alps, was found to have whipw...

This exploration of cutting-edge evolutionary medicine and how our body's performance is shaped by its past "covers fascinating territory" ( Publishers Weekly).We think of medical science and doctors as focused on treating conditions—whether it's a cough or an aching back. But the sicknesses and complaints that cause us to seek medical attention actually have deeper origins than the superficial germs and behaviors we regularly fault. In fact, as Jeremy Tayl...

Get the information you need to know regarding Microbiology with this handy guide. It contains information on: the history of microbiology, kingdoms, prokaryotes & eukaryotes, cell theory and much more.

“Offers a useful reminder of the role of modern science in fundamentally transforming all of our lives.” —President Barack Obama (on Twitter)“An important book.” —Steven Pinker, The New York Times Book ReviewThe surprising and important story of how humans gained what amounts to an extra life, from the bestselling author of How We Got to Now and Where Good Ideas Come FromIn 1920, at the en...

The secret history of our most vital organ: the human heart.The Man Who Touched His Own Heart tells the raucous, gory, mesmerizing story of the heart, from the first "explorers" who dug up cadavers and plumbed their hearts' chambers, through the first heart surgeries -- which had to be completed in three minutes before death arrived -- to heart transplants and the latest medical efforts to prolong our hearts' lives, almost defying nature in the process.