Virus Hunters

Description

The effective science popularizer has to surmount the double hurdles of factual accuracy and alluring presentation. In virus Hunters, Greer Williams manages to mount both these barriers in telling what he describes as possibly the biggest "double take" in the history of medical science. He recites first the story of the classical microbe hunters, starting with Edward Jenner, and then the exciting activities of virologists in recent decades. Williams retraces the drama told by Paul de Kruif in Microbe Hunters (1926), but adds to the story the research work of such people as Wendell M. Stanley, Ernest W. Goodpasture, Thomas Francis, Jr., Max Theiler, Richard E. Shope, John F. Enders, Jonas E. Salk, Albert B. Sabin, and Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat, Aware (as he points out in his book) that many physicians felt that de Kruif, an ex-bacteriologist, was "a popular medical writer who too often went overboard," Williams tries to curb some of his enthusiasm for promising leads when he discusses such ideas as a possible cure for the common cold and the speculation that viruses may cause cancer.