A fascinating historical account of the American Phage Group and how its new research framework became the foundation for molecular biologyThis book is the first critical and analytical study of the American Phage Group—a small group of scientists who gathered around Max Delbrück, Salvador Luria, and Alfred Hershey between 1940 and 1960—and how this novel research program became the foundation of the field of molecular biology. These three young, charismatic, and i...

This book relates how, between 1954 and 1961, the biologist Seymour Benzer mapped the fine structure of the rII region of the genome of the bacterial virus known as phage T4. Benzer’s accomplishments are widely recognized as a tipping point in mid-twentieth-century molecular biology when the nature of the gene was recast in molecular terms. More often than any other individual, he is considered to have led geneticists from the classical gene into the molecular age. Drawing on Ben...

When plague broke out in Manchuria in 1910 as a result of transmission from marmots to humans, it struck a region struggling with the introduction of Western medicine, as well as with the interactions of three different national powers: Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. In this fascinating case history, William Summers relates how this plague killed as many as 60,000 people in less than a year, and uses the analysis to examine the actions and interactions of the multinational doctors, politi...