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Virus Hunt
- The Search for the Origin of HIV
- Narrated by: Alice Gilmour
- Length: 6 hrs and 47 mins
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Publisher's summary
The hunt for the origin of the AIDS virus began over 20 years ago. It was a journey that went around the world and involved painstaking research to unravel how, when, and where the virus first infected humans. Dorothy H. Crawford traces the story back to the remote rain forests of Africa - home to the primates that carry the ancestral virus - and reveals how HIV-1 first jumped from chimpanzees to humans in rural southeast Cameroon. Examining how this happened, and how it then travelled back to Colonial west central Africa where it eventually exploded as a pandemic, she asks why and how it was able to spread so widely. From hospital intensive care wards to research laboratories and the African rain forests, this is the wide-ranging story of a killer virus and a tale of scientific endeavour.
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Story
Between Hope and Fear tells the remarkable story of vaccine-preventable infectious diseases and their social and political implications. While detailing the history of vaccine invention, Michael Kinch reveals the ominous reality that our victories against vaccine-preventable diseases are not permanent - and could easily be undone. Between Hope and Fear relates the remarkable intersection of science, technology, and disease that has helped eradicate many of the deadliest plagues known to man.
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Enjoyed
- By Minsi Zhang on 05-03-20
By: Michael Kinch
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The Deeper Genome
- Why There Is More to the Human Genome than Meets the Eye
- By: John Parrington
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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Over a decade ago, as the Human Genome Project completed its mapping of the entire human genome, hopes ran high that we would rapidly be able to use our knowledge of human genes to tackle many inherited diseases, and understand what makes us unique among animals. But things didn't turn out that way.
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Great Scientific Writing/ Wrong Narrator
- By Richard on 11-24-15
By: John Parrington
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The Language of Life
- DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine
- By: Francis S. Collins
- Narrated by: Greg Itzin
- Length: 10 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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A scientific and medical revolution has crept up on us, based on study after study, from hundreds of laboratories around the world. It is no longer just a theoretical shift: every one of us will be touched by it, and many of us already have been. The meaning of disease, our understanding of the human body, and crucial decisions about what we all need to know and what choices we make about our health are at stake. Welcome to the new world of personalized medicine.
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The future of medicine
- By Ronald E on 04-12-10
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p53: The Gene That Cracked the Cancer Code
- By: Sue Armstrong
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Jasicki
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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p53: The Gene That Cracked the Cancer Code reveals the tale of the search for this gene, as well as the excitement of the hunt for new cures - the hype, the lost opportunities, the blind alleys, and the thrilling breakthroughs. As the long-anticipated revolution in cancer treatment tailored to each individual patient's symptoms starts to take off at last, p53 is still at the forefront of the game. This is a timely tale of scientific discovery and advances in our understanding of a disease that still affects more than one in three of us at some point in our lives.
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Excellent story! Unfortunate narration at start
- By Adriana on 12-25-14
By: Sue Armstrong
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Missing Microbes
- How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues
- By: Martin J. Blaser
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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In Missing Microbes, Dr. Martin J. Blaser invites us into the wilds of the human microbiome, where for hundreds of thousands of years bacterial and human cells have existed in a peaceful symbiosis that is responsible for the health and equilibrium of our body. Now this invisible eden is being irrevocably damaged by some of our most revered medical advances-antibiotics-threatening the extinction of our irreplaceable microbes with terrible health consequences.
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Very enlightening and information well supported
- By James on 05-03-15
By: Martin J. Blaser
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Pandora's Seed
- The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization
- By: Spencer Wells
- Narrated by: Spencer Wells
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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This new book by Spencer Wells, the internationally known geneticist, anthropologist, author, and director of the Genographic Project, focuses on the seminal event in human history: mankind's decision to become farmers rather than hunter-gatherers.
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Short and unfocused, but often quite interesting.
- By Alan on 06-23-10
By: Spencer Wells
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Happy Accidents
- Serendipity in Major Medical Breakthroughs in the Twentieth Century
- By: Morton A. Meyers
- Narrated by: Richard Waterhouse
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Happy Accidents is a fascinating, entertaining, and highly accessible look at the surprising role serendipity has played in some of the most important medical discoveries in the 20th century. What do penicillin, chemotherapy drugs, X-rays, Valium, the Pap smear, and Viagra have in common? They were each discovered accidentally, stumbled upon in the search for something else. In discussing medical breakthroughs, Dr. Morton Meyers makes a cogent, highly engaging argument for a more creative, rather than purely linear, approach to science. And it may just save our lives!
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Don't waste your money!
- By Amazon Customer on 03-20-16
By: Morton A. Meyers
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Evolving Ourselves
- How Unnatural Selection and Nonrandom Mutation are Changing Life on Earth
- By: Juan Enriquez, Steve Gullans
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 10 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Why are conditions like autism, asthma, obesity, and allergies exploding at unprecedented rates? Why are we living longer, getting smarter, having far fewer kids? If Darwin were alive today, how would he explain this new world?
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fascinating ideas and science
- By Joel on 07-04-15
By: Juan Enriquez, and others
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A Short History of Humanity
- A New History of Old Europe
- By: Johannes Krause, Thomas Trappe, Caroline Waight - translator
- Narrated by: Stephen Graybill
- Length: 6 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Johannes Krause is the director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and a brilliant pioneer in the field of archaeogenetics - archaeology augmented by DNA sequencing technology - which has allowed scientists to reconstruct human history reaching back hundreds of thousands of years before recorded time. In this surprising account, Krause and journalist Thomas Trappe rewrite a fascinating chapter of this history, the peopling of Europe, that takes us from the Neanderthals and Denisovans to the present.
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Not a short history of humanity
- By Brent on 05-02-21
By: Johannes Krause, and others
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Before the Dawn
- Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors
- By: Nicholas Wade
- Narrated by: Alan Sklar
- Length: 12 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Just in the last three years a flood of new scientific findings, driven by revelations discovered in the human genome, has provided compelling new answers to many long-standing mysteries about our most ancient ancestors, the people who first evolved in Africa and then went on to colonize the whole world. Nicholas Wade weaves this host of news-making findings together for the first time into an intriguing new history of the human story before the dawn of civilization.
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Amazing information
- By Albert on 06-15-07
By: Nicholas Wade
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The Gene
- An Intimate History
- By: Siddhartha Mukherjee
- Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris
- Length: 19 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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The extraordinary Siddhartha Mukherjee has written a biography of the gene as deft, brilliant, and illuminating as his extraordinarily successful biography of cancer. Weaving science, social history, and personal narrative to tell us the story of one of the most important conceptual breakthroughs of modern times, Mukherjee animates the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices.
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It's a Wonderful Book
- By JKC on 06-02-16
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Seven Modern Plagues
- And How We Are Causing Them
- By: Mark Jerome Walter
- Narrated by: Brian Troxell
- Length: 5 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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According to veterinarian and journalist Mark Walters, we are contributing to - if not overtly causing - some of the scariest epidemics of our time. Through human stories and cutting-edge science, Walters explores the origins of seven diseases: Mad Cow Disease, HIV/AIDS, Salmonella DT104, Lyme Disease, Hantavirus, West Nile, and new strains of flu. He shows that they originate from manipulation of the environment, from emitting carbon and clear-cutting forests to feeding naturally herbivorous cows “recycled animal protein.”
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Frightening, truthful and a real eye opener
- By RobJD on 02-23-15
What listeners say about Virus Hunt
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Wilf H.
- 04-14-18
Essential information but need some kind of background to understand it
Fascinating story, less accessible than spill over by David Quanmon but full of interesting facts. Generation I felt was a little too rapid and sterile for such an important topic.
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- Scott
- 06-28-14
Amazing piece of medical detective work
Any additional comments?
This book is an epidemiologist's dream. This is an utterly engrossing history of the hunt for the origin of the HIV virus. I was completely surprised that scientists seem to have been able to trace the origins of HIV to seemingly pinpoint places and times, stretching back further than I had previously thought. Rather than one continuous storyline/narrative, the author breaks this up into chapters that weave parallel but ultimately converging lines of investigation, tracing back from those first diagnosed, through the carriers who were the unwitting spreaders of the pandemic, through the disparate strains of HIV that became identified and laid a train back to the places and animals of the virus' origins. Incredible and would strain belief if not true. This audiobook had me from minute one. Still, I can't give it a full five stars. At time, I found the writing a bit dry, as if reading a collection of scientific papers. A more skilled writer might have found a way to craft this more as a whodunit in the spirit of a good true crime writer for instance. For instance, you never get much of a sense of who any of the multitude of scientists are behind the investigation - thus the narrative appeals solely to the intellect rather than any emotion. As well, I found myself getting lost at times in the array of different names of primate species, their lineage, as well as the alphanumeric strains of the different HIV strains. Indeed, the audiobook frequently references various diagrams and figures that would only be accessible in the actual book and would help clarify things. Still, those with a curiosity or interest in the origins of this modern pandemic will enjoy this book.
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2 people found this helpful
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- zein
- 10-29-14
Not terrible but not a recommendale book for me.
Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?
I think if you learn one thing reading a book it is always time well spent. So yes, it was time well spent.
What was most disappointing about Dorothy H. Crawford’s story?
It was very 2 dimensional. Only chapters 5 and 6 drew you into the story. The rest was incredibly flat. I think the facts were brilliant but if you are going to write a book and then put it into audio, there needs to be life and color to the numbers and data otherwise you're reading a chart or graph aloud.
What does Alice Gilmour bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
I did like her performance overall however, she pronounced medicine as MED-cine and not med-I-cine. Not the biggest deal in the world, especially if this were a book on golf or party planning but seeing as how the foundational topic is medical I felt like it was a horrible word to be mispronouncing.
Was Virus Hunt worth the listening time?
I think if anything is learned whatsoever, it is time well spent but I would not recommend this book as I felt the story line was not colorful enough. It felt like looking down a string of facts hurriedly tied together without the slightest attempt to paint a picture for the reader. Some parts of the book were several minutes of nothing but genetic code and scientific names. Both of those things are vital for this type of book as a whole but you need to put them into a frame for the reader, to tell the STORY of both those very important things.
Any additional comments?
I felt other books covered the topic with story telling that brought you into the fold better. The book Spillover does not cover HIV in such detail but I think it tells the story of the virus, its origins and evolution with greater inspiration. This is more technical but fails to tell the story of the those facts.
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1 person found this helpful