When Science Goes Wrong

Experimental brain surgery goes horribly awry; a dam fails catastrophically; a geologist leads an ill-equipped party to its doom in the mouth of an active volcano: these are the amazing and sometimes horrific stories of technical errors and scientific mistakes that LeVay (The Sexual Brain) relates. Some, like the case of the British meteorologist who failed to predict a hurricane that killed 18 people, seem due to arrogance. Others—the loss of a costly spacecraft, a criminal conviction based on inaccurate DNA analysis, multiple deaths after an accidental release of anthrax—are the result of ordinary human error. Some incidents may well have been deliberate, such as a nuclear reactor error that was possibly the result of a love triangle gone bad, or the data falsified by a physicist seeking fame as the discoverer of a new element. LeVay surveys a range of fields, offering several reasons why things go wrong and noting that for every brilliant scientific success, there are a dozen failures. Readers curious about particularly notorious cases will find LeVay's book both entertaining and thought provoking

Food Fray: Inside the Controversy over Genetically Modified Food

More than ten years ago, the first genetically modified foods took their place on the shelves of American supermarkets. But while American consumers remained blissfully unconcerned with the new products that suddenly filled their kitchens, Europeans were much more wary of these “Frankenfoods.” When famine struck Africa in 2002, several nations refused shipments of genetically modified foods, fueling a controversy that put the issue on the world's political agenda for good.

In Food Fray, esteemed molecular biologist Dr. Lisa H. Weasel brings readers into the center of this debate, capturing the real-life experiences of the scientists, farmers, policymakers and grassroots activists on the front lines. Here she combines solid scientific knowledge and a gripping narrative to tell the real story behind the headlines and the hype. Seminal and cutting-edge, Food Fray enlightens and informs and will allow readers to make up their own minds about one of the most important issues facing us today.

Yeast Biotechnology: Diversity and Applications

This book is an attempt in updating the knowledge by the experts that has accumulated in the last few decades on the yeasts which are eukaryotic unicellular microfungi that are widely distributed in the natural environments, and isolated from normal as well as the specialized or extreme environments like those with low water potential, low temperature, and low oxygen availability. Around 1500 species of yeasts belonging to over 100 genera have been described so far. Yeasts play an important role in food chains, and carbon, nitrogen and sulphur cycles, and Yeasts (e.g. Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Hansenula polymorpha, Pichia pastoris) are now being used to express foreign genes for producing human proteins of pharmaceutical interest. A landmark in biotechnology was reached in 1996 with the completion of the sequencing of the entire genome of S. cerevisiae. The genome sequencing of three more yeasts (Schizosaccharomyces pombe, Candida albicans and Cryptococcus neofromans) have recently been completed. Saccharomyces cerevisiae has now become a central player in the development of an entirely new approach to biological research – systems biology.

The products of modern yeast biotechnologies impinge on many commercially important sectors including food, beverages, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, industrial enzymes, agriculture and environmental bioremediation. Although the vast majority of yeasts are beneficial to human life, only a few are opportunistic human pathogens.

The book is aimed at bringing together the scattered information on the diversity of yeasts in the normal and extreme environments, their ecology and adaptations, taxonomy and systematics, physiology and biochemistry, molecular aspects, and biotechnological applications.

• Hardcover: 740 pages
• Publisher: Springer; 1 edition (December 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1402082916
• ISBN-13: 978-1402082917