Complete reviews can be read by clicking on the links at left.
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From THE NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE
August 14, 2003
"Understanding prions — and why they transform from harmless to malevolent entities that carve up the brains of animals including man — is a quest that could only be undertaken with the aid of the latest hi-tech science. And making such complex science interesting and understandable is a challenge. A lot of college professors fail horribly at the task. The subject matter is extremely important to modern life, but the manner of presentation is often obtuse, boring, and mind-boggling confusing — coming off like an in-joke among a select group.
Philip Yam, Scientific American writer and editor, has a knack for boiling down complex science and making it palatable to the general public. Yam demonstrates his skills in an important new book, The Pathological Protein. At times reading almost like a Michael Crichton techno-thriller, Yam traces the history of TSE diseases, leading the reader through the wilderness of cutting-edge science. His treatment is thorough, entertaining, and honest."
--James Swan
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From PRIONDATA.ORG Website:
"Yam, who has written and edited for the Scientific American has a singularly easy style to read and the story that he tells is of how the family in Devizes in England first found their son had variant CJD. When the family realised that what their son had got was much bigger than this it was time to open up the rest of the book to explain all the other infections that work in the same way. He writes this for a wide audience with it being interesting for everyone from the scientists to the average reader and he includes large amounts of information showing just how, even by the time that vCJD first appeared we were already sitting on a powerder keg full of infection in the world and had to cross our fingers that it wasnt going to cause a major epidemic around the world. In a way like Scientific American it is written with a personal style, with people's names brought into play frequently and historical explanations of how individuals fought their corner in BSE. Unlike many of the previous books on the subject that is aimed at the wide audience this one goes onto the search for cures and diagnostic tests that is now such an important factor. Rachel Forber, the first case to be treated with quinacrine was included and Vicky Rimmer the child that was dying slowly of a similar illness, for instance. He has clearly read a lot a paper to be able to understand where it all fits...because the subject is absolutely massive and he clearly has raked the internet for the information that was needed. One thing that is particularly impressive is that he puts www.priondata.org as the first online source. A book aimed at a very wide audience but scientifically involving."
--Stephen Dealler, U.K. microbiologist who was one of the first to warn that mad cow disease could jump to humans.
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From THE LIBRARY JOURNAL
June 15, 2003
"When mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), and the linked human disease variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) made headlines in the early 1990s, many dire predictions and books were issued. Luckily, the epidemic has not surfaced (so far there have been fewer than 100 cases since 1994), but it is still important to learn from past mistakes and understand BSE and other prion (proteinaceous infectious particle) diseases. Because of the ten- to 15-year incubation period, scientists and public health officials are still concerned about the future possibilities of other infected victims. Yam, a writer and editor for Scientific American since 1989, presents a detailed yet readable history of the mad cow scare and other prion diseases that affect humans and animals, such as scrapie. In this regard, his book is similar to Maxime Schwartz's How the Cows Turned Mad in which Schwartz, a French scientist, covers scrapie BSE from a European perspective. Yam gives more coverage to the U.S. reactions to BSE and delves into the problems of chronic wasting disease (CWD) in elk and deer in North America and the research on other prion diseases like fatal familial insomnia (FFI). Recommended for most science collections."
--Margaret Henderson, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Library, New York
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