🧲 Books like this
Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives
Annie Murphy Paul · back to the book
What’s in it
Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.
24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorInheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives--and Our Lives Change Our Genes
Sharon Moalem · 272 pages
In this book, the author, a physician and writer employs his wide-ranging and interdisciplinary approach to science and medicine, explaining how art, history, superheroes, sex workers, and sports stars all help us understand the impact of our lives on our genes, and our genes on our lives. He explains new concepts in human genetics and health that indicate that the fundamental nature of the human
Woman: An Intimate Geography
Natalie Angier · 407 pages
Natalie Angier lifts the veil of secrecy from that most enigmatic of evolutionary masterpieces, the female body, exploring the essence of what it means to be a woman. Angier takes on everything from organs (breasts "are funny things, really, and we should learn to laugh at them") to orgasm (happily for women, the clitoris has 8,000 nerve fibers, twice the number in the penis). Also delving into t
Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History
Florence Williams · 338 pages
Did you know that breast milk contains substances similar to cannabis? Or that it’s sold on the Internet for 262 times the price of oil? Feted and fetishized, the breast is an evolutionary masterpiece. But in the modern world, the breast is changing. Breasts are getting bigger, arriving earlier, and attracting newfangled chemicals. Increasingly, the odds are stacked against us in the struggle with
The Secret Life of Fat: The Science Behind the Body's Least Understood Organ and What It Means for You
Sylvia Tara · 235 pages
Blends historical perspectives with cutting-edge research to examine body fat as a critical endocrine organ that can be better understood and managed when recognized as a necessary component of human health. Biochemist Sylvia Tara explores the surprising science behind our most hated body part. Fat is an obsession, a dirty word, a subject of national handwringingand, according to biochemist Sylvi
Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It
Gary Taubes · 257 pages
This book is an eye-opening, myth-shattering examination of what makes us fat, from acclaimed science writer Gary Taubes. In his New York Times best seller, Good Calories, Bad Calories, Taubes argued that our diet's overemphasis on certain kinds of carbohydrates -- not fats and not simply excess calories -- has led directly to the obesity epidemic we face today. The result of thorough research, ke
The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age
Nathan Wolfe · 304 pages
"Dynamic young Stanford biologist Nathan Wolfe reveals the surprising origins of the world's most deadly viruses, and how we can overcome catastrophic pandemics. In The Viral Storm, award-winning biologist Nathan Wolfe tells the story of how viruses and human beings have evolved side by side through history; how deadly viruses like HIV, swine flu, and bird flu almost wiped us out in the past; and
The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
Walter Isaacson · 560 pages
A scientific biography of Jennifer Doudna, a founder and co-developer of the CRISPR gene-editing mechanism, and an examination of what happened after CRISPR hit the marketplace.
Making the Monster: The Science Behind Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (Bloomsbury Sigma)
Kathryn Harkup · 305 pages
The Wild Life of Our Bodies: Predators, Parasites, and Partners That Shape Who We Are Today
Rob Dunn · 304 pages
Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Plague
Richard Rhodes · 259 pages
It lurks in the meat we eat. Undetectable, it incubates for years. It kills by eating holes in people's brains, so that they stagger and collapse and lose their minds. It's one hundred percent fatal. And it's already abroad in America. Deadly Feasts reads like a Michael Crichton thriller - but it's documented fact, bringing sober early warning of a new threat to our very lives that every one of us
Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
Mary Roach · 348 pages
The irresistible, ever-curious, and always best-selling Mary Roach returns with a new adventure to the invisible realm we carry around inside. “America’s funniest science writer” (Washington Post) takes us down the hatch on an unforgettable tour. The alimentary canal is classic Mary Roach terrain: the questions explored in Gulp are as taboo, in their way, as the cadavers in Stiff and every bit
The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine's Deepest Mystery
George Johnson · 284 pages
An exploration of the history and recent advances of cancer research that will challenge everything you thought you knew about the disease.
Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond
Sonia Shah · 288 pages
Scientists agree that a pathogen is likely to cause a global pandemic in the near future. But which one? And how? Over the past fifty years, more than three hundred infectious diseases have either newly emerged or reemerged. Ninety percent of epidemiologists expect that one of them will cause a deadly pandemic sometime in the next two generations. It could be Ebola, avian flu, a drug-resistant sup
Follow Your Gut: How the Ecosystem in Your Gut Determines Your Health, Mood, and More
Rob Knight, Brendan Buhler · 120 pages
Killer Germs: Microbes and Diseases That Threaten Humanity
Barry E. Zimmerman, David J. Zimmerman · 272 pages
The book goes on a fascinating journey into the amazing world of viruses, bacteria, protozoa, fungi, and worms and explores the roles they have played in shaping the course of human history. From biblical plagues, to the AIDS crisis, to supergerms of the future, this updated and revised edition of the original covers the whole gamut of diseases that have threatened humanity since its origins. It a
The Spark of Life: Electricity in the Human Body
Frances Ashcroft · 345 pages
A spectacular account of the body electric, showing how, from before conception to the last breath we draw, electrical signals in our cells are essential to everything we think and do.
Microbe Hunters
Paul de Kruif · 363 pages
Paul de Kruif’s classic account of the first scientists to see and learn about the microscopic world continues to fascinate new readers. This is a timeless dramatization of the scientists, bacteriologists, doctors, and medical technicians who discovered the microbes and invented the vaccines to counter them. De Kruif writes about how seemingly simple but really fundamental discovers of science—for
The Female Brain
Louann Brizendine · 279 pages
While doing research as a medical student at Yale and then as a resident and faculty member at Harvard, Dr. Brizendine discovered that almost all of the clinical data on neurology, psychology, and neurobiology focused exclusively on males. In response to the need for information on the female mind, Brizendine established the first clinic in the country to study and treat women's brain function. At
Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Being Human
Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, Kathryn Bowers · 320 pages
In the tradition of Temple Grandin, Oliver Sacks, and Neil Shubin, cardiologist and psychiatrist Natterson-Horowitz and science writer Bowers look at the remarkable correspondences between the way human beings and animals live, die, get sick, and heal in their natural settings.
Venomous: How Earth's Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry
Christie Wilcox · 256 pages
Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping
Robert M. Sapolsky, H. Lee Hetherington · 560 pages
The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher
Lewis Thomas · 175 pages
Includes material on warts, DNA, cloning, and medical economics.