Dancing Matrix:How Science Confronts Emerging Viruses

Description

Even as humanity reels beneath the assault of AIDS, epidemiologists are gearing themselves up for the plague's successor. It might be dengue fever, whose carrier, the Asian tiger mosquito, has recently appeared in the United States, or Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which has been transmitted by contaminated human growth hormone. The next pandemic might be caused by any of a dozen viruses that were once confined to other species or territories but now place human beings at risk as we increasingly cross their boundaries.

Updated to include the latest research and developments, this fascinating and sometimes unsetting book sums up all that we currently know about viruses: what they are, how they spread, and how scientists are trying to outwit them. Interweaving theory and real-life medical drama, A Dancing Matrix is science reportage at its most suspenseful and informative.

About the Author

I'm a long-time science journalist and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. In addition to my most recent book -- Twentysomething: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck?, co-authored with my daughter Samantha Henig -- I've written eight others, including Pandora’s Baby: How the First Test Tube Babies Sparked the Reproductive Revolution and The Monk in the Garden: The Lost and Found Genius of Gregor Mendel, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (and also, I'm tickled to report, a finalist for the Goodchild Prize for Excellent English from the Queen's English Society). My articles about health and medicine have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Civilization, Discover, Scientific American, Newsweek, Slate, and just about every woman’s magazine in the grocery store. I am vice president of the National Association of Science Writers, and in 2010 I received a Career Achievement Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors as well as a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. I went to Cornell and have a master’s in journalism from Northwestern. I live in Manhattan with my husband Jeff, a political scientist who teaches at Columbia University's Teachers College, and have two grown daughters, Samantha and her older sister Jess Zimmerman.