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the exotic pasts of the viruses and bacteria that periodically emerge in deadly outbreaks with such disasterous results. It is our knowledge of their secret lives in the moist and teeming rain forests that gives us hope of taming future epidemics.
List of contents
The Anatomy Of Plagues * The Delicate Balance Between Life and Death * The Penumbra of Disease * The Worst of Times Chief Monster That Has Plagued The Nations Yet * Four Tales from the New Decameron * Was the Indian Plague Actually Plague, and if Not Why Not? Nave And Cunning Diseases * Cholera, the Black One * A Cleverer Pathogen The Challenge Of The Temperate Zones * An Ague Very Violent * Syphilis and the Faustian Bargain Plagues, Populations And The Biosphere * AIDS and the Future of Plagues * Safety in Diversity * Why So Many Diseases?
About the author
Christopher Wills is Professor of Biology at the University of California at San Diego. His books include Yellow Fever, Black Goddess and Children of Prometheus. Jeffrey Bada is Professor of Marine Chemistry and Director of the NASA Specialized Center of Research and Training in Exobiology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.
Summary
In this remarkable account, evolutionary biologist Christopher Wills takes us on a voyage of discovery through the exotic pasts of the viruses and bacteria that periodically emerge with such disastrous results for our species. It is our knowledge of their secret lives, the eons spent quietly passing in and out of myriad other life forms, mutating and coadapting, that gives us hope of taming them. By putting these organismsfrom bubonic plague to Ebolaat center-stage, Wills shows how we will eventually master them.
