Arthur Allen

A fascinating account of vaccination's miraculous, inflammatory past and its uncertain future.In 1796, as smallpox ravaged Europe, Edward Jenner injected a child with a benign version of the disease, then exposed the child to the deadly virus itself. The boy proved resistant to smallpox, and Jenner's risky experiment produced the earliest vaccination. In this deftly written account, journalist Arthur Allen reveals a history of vaccination that is both illuminated with hope and shrouded by controversy—from Jenner's discovery to Pasteur's vaccines for rabies and cholera, to those that safeguarded the children of the twentieth century, and finally to the tumult currently surrounding vaccination.Faced with threats from anthrax to AIDS, we are a vulnerable population and can no longer depend on vaccines; numerous studies have linked childhood vaccination with various neurological disorders, and our pharmaceutical companies are more attracted to the profits of treatment than to the prevention of disease. With narrative grace and investigative journalism, Allen explores our shifting understanding of vaccination since its creation. 16 pages of illustrations.

Few diseases are more gruesome than typhus. Transmitted by body lice, it afflicts the dispossessed—refugees, soldiers, and ghettoized peoples—causing hallucinations, terrible headaches, boiling fever, and often death. The disease plagued the German army on the Eastern Front and left the Reich desperate for a vaccine. For this they turned to the brilliant and eccentric Polish zoologist Rudolf Weigl.In the 1920s, Weigl had created the first typhus vaccine using a method as bold as it was dangerous for its use of living human subjects. The astonishing success of Weigl’s techniques attracted the attention and admiration of the world—giving him cover during the Nazi’s violent occupation of Lviv. His lab soon flourished as a hotbed of resistance. Weigl hired otherwise doomed mathematicians, writers, doctors, and other thinkers, protecting them from atrocity. The team engaged in a sabotage campaign by sending illegal doses of the vaccine into the Polish ghettos while shipping gallons of the weakened serum to the Wehrmacht.Among the scientists saved by Weigl, who was a Christian, was a gifted Jewish immunologist named Ludwik Fleck. Condemned to Buchenwald and pressured to re-create the typhus vaccine under the direction of a sadistic Nazi doctor, Erwin Ding-Schuler, Fleck had to make an awful choice between his scientific ideals or the truth of his conscience. In risking his life to carry out a dramatic subterfuge to vaccinate the camp’s most endangered prisoners, Fleck performed an act of great heroism.Drawing on extensive research and interviews with survivors, Arthur Allen tells the harrowing story of two brave scientists—a Christian and a Jew— who put their expertise to the best possible use, at the highest personal danger.

The tomato. As savory as any vegetable, as sweet as its fellow fruits, the seeded succulent inspires a cult–like devotion from food lovers on all continents. The people of Ohio love the tomato so much they made tomato juice the official state beverage. An annual food festival in Spain draws thousands of participants in a 100–ton tomato fight. The inimitable, versatile tomato has conquered the cuisines of Spain and Italy, and in America, it is our most popular garden vegetable. Journalist Arthur Allen understands the spell of the tomato and is your guide in telling its dramatic story. He begins by describing in mouthwatering detail the wonder of a truly delicious tomato, then introduces the man who prospected for wild tomato genes in South America and made them available to tomato breeders. He tells the baleful story of enslaved Mexican Indians in the Florida tomato fields, the conquest of the canning tomato by the Chinese Army, and the struggle of Italian tomato producers to maintain a way of life. Allen combines reportage, archival research, and innumerable anecdotes in a lively narrative that, through the lens of today's global market, tells a story that will resonate from greenhouse to dinner table.

Perfectly Fake-Free Odd Facts is a collection of odd and weird factoids. Our use of the term fake- free is often challenged by the iconoclasts. They refer to our facts as murky research-based ba- loney. Our very perfect research might be a tad murky but it’s never boloney. Perfect facts with a microscopic tad of murky. We’ve also thrown in our That’s Odd comics for extra measure.

Excerpt from The Desoto, 1941

If the words "beautiful prison" are hard to say, does that explain why architects seldom, if ever, talk or write about the artistic merits and functional failures of asylum and prison design? In an attempt to understand this silence, and the absence of asylums and prisons in competitions seeking honors for excellence in design, the papers in this book examine what may be architects' most difficult field of work. In North America architects are required by law to design institutional buildings, but with political change, their clients often change their minds, demanding civilized or brutal confinement in turn. When brutality or indifferent treatment is required that aggravates crime or madness, to do the work an architect must defy his/her code of ethics which demands service in the public interest. Architects are not alone with this quandary. This book concludes that resolution of this discussion requires that when a client and an architect know the intentions and consequences of a buildings design and operations, they must share the moral and functional responsibilities of the work.

. with dw, 1955, 287pp

. with dw, 1959 2nd imp, 288pp