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John Crewdson lives in Washington, D.C.

Œuvres de John Crewdson

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Required reading. I read the original publication in the nineties. It was cool b/c the bibliography was provided at a website online with links to the cited material! Why a career in biomedical research can suck!
 
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Sapiens1 | 1 autre critique | Apr 27, 2011 |
Crewdson's preface opens with the words "This is not a book about AIDS. Nor is it really about science." Those words probably give a good insight into the author's motivations for writing this book, but I don't think they are a fair reflection of what you might get from reading it.

True, the primary theme is the motivations, falsehoods and personal rivalries that surround the discovery of AIDS, its cause, and the tests that were developed for HIV as a result. On that level it is an excellent, even obsessive, piece of work. Assertions and quotations are scrupulously cross-referenced, meeting a standard far higher than many academic texts. At times, one feels that the author's emotions may have got the better of him - one or two assertions are not quite supported by the text referred to. But these exceptions are very few, and to the author's credit we are able to make these assessments ourselves. The author also allows other views to be put forward. He clearly has a low opinion of Robert Gallo, but quotes others who feel that, whilst Gallo may not be a very nice man, he was a good scientist.

You are unlikely to feel that if you finish this book, but you won't feel that Luc Montagnier is a saint either. It's a very good description of how scientists are subject to vanities and human frailties, but also of how science in general has devised systems that usually - but not always - keep our failings at bay.

There are some failings in the text. The font size is unusually small, and makes for hard going. (My edition is 670 pages, though, and one dreads to think how big it would be in a larger typeface.) But more annoyingly, it uses three different forms of reference to out-of-band text: superscript lowercase letters refer to notes at the end of the book; superscript numerals refer to source documents, and occasional asterisk-like symbols point to footnotes. Given the small size of the base font, the superscript letters and numbers are pretty hard to distinguish even for someone with good up-close eyesight. What's more, the source document references aren't in the book at all, but online on an associated website. This is annoying, in that I felt I had to read the book with a computer to hand. But it has one advantage, in that Crewdson has obtained scans of many of the source documents and they are linked to in the online list. You can thus check easily whether or not he is quoting selectively, or reflecting the tone of the original letters and reports.

But these gripes are minor. This is an excellent history of the early years of AIDS science. It's well-indexed, and includes a handy timeline of key events and list and brief description of the people who appear in the story. The author's journalistic discipline shows in the tight control of chapter length - they rarely vary much from about 20 pages of text, which was about as much as I could take in in one sitting. Not for everyone, but an excellent book for those with an interest in the story of HIV, or the wider topic of scientific fraud or behaviour.
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½
 
Signalé
kevinashley | 1 autre critique | Sep 15, 2009 |

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Œuvres
3
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