108 THE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF BIOLOGY
plete and health-promotive approach to dealing with
HUMAN BIOLOGY AND HEALTH
Health, Wellbeing, Competence and Aging. An-
nals of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Volume 6.
Edited by Ping-Chung Leung, Jean Woo, and Walter
Kofler. Hackensack (New Jersey): World Scientific Pub-
lishing. $48.00. xxi ⫹ 224 p.; ill.; index. ISBN:
978-981-4425-66-7. 2013.
A major issue in the use of non-Western medicine,
including traditional Chinese medicine, is the lack of
an evidence-based approach in its practice. This vol-
ume of essays, broadly related to nontraditional
health practices that could be utilized at greater scale
to ameliorate the issues that coincide with senes-
cence, offers a spectrum of options for alternative
practices to improve well-being in the increasingly
populous demographic of the elderly. Stemming
from the sixth conference on the subject of aging
and well-being, this volume includes a vast array of
topics relating to non-Western approaches and per-
spectives on alleviating the issues attributed to the
process of aging. The integration of many disciplin-
ary approaches—philosophical, medical, health
practice-oriented, and historical—among the essays
attempt to persuade readers toward accepting the
benefits of nontraditional approaches to public
health for the elderly without completely providing a
solution to the lack of empirical basis. The success of
this book depends on the reader’s area of expertise,
as the depth of each essay is limited by the brevity of
the articles and the irregular formatting. However,
the canonical dominance of Western medicine over-
shadows the complete story of the history of medi-
cine and public health, and the contributions from
these authors could broaden its scope.
Integrating Russian biomedical practices that emu-
lated Chinese pursuits of life elongation with Western
scientific practice over a 250-year period, the brisk sixth
essay, The Life as a Struggle for Immortality: History of
Ideas in Russian Gerontology, covers the understudied
topic of the intellectual history of medicine in Russia
with great success. The expansive cast of characters
integrates the German founder of aging studies August
Weismann, his royal Russian follower (and conceptual
peer of Alfred Russel Wallace in terms of conceptual-
izing the cellular, nuclear, mechanism of aging) Prince
Ivan R. Tarkhanov, Sergei Petrovich Botkin, and Alex-
ander Alexandrovich Kad’jan (the first clinical geron-
tologists) and Il’ya Il’ich Mechnikov, who coined the
term gerontology. By integrating Russian ideas and
contributions to aging studies, the essay succeeds in
what seems to be the purpose of the entire text, that is,
to illustrate how multicultural approaches to public
health in the face of senescence create a more com-
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Volume 90
aging. In addition, the Russian viewpoint links the evo-
lutionary purpose of aging and postreproductive
chronic disease to the fact that death and chronic ill-
ness promote the cycling of generations. As the authors
show, aging in Russian thought was a touchstone for
the intellectual dilemmas of the time—the scientific
quest for eternal life, resurrection and waning religios-
ity, the advent of technology, and its resulting effects on
the infrastructures of the prosaic.
Certainly this essay, which contextualizes the bio-
medical discoveries with contemporary political figures,
global evolutionary figures, and the interplay of tech-
nological advancement and social anxiety, deserves to
be extended into its own monograph. The rest of the
text might be most appreciated by practitioners of pub-
lic health, who seek best practices for managing non-
traditional geriatric medicine and reasons for doing so.
Emily Hutcheson, Office of Research, Florida
State University, Tallahassee, Florida
Immunity and Tolerance. Cold Spring Harbor Sym-
posia on Quantitative Biology, Volume LXXVIII.
Symposium Organizers and Proceedings Editor: Anne
O’Garra, Michel Nussenzweig, Stephen Smale, David
Stewart, and Bruce Stillman. Cold Spring Harbor (New
York): Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. $318.00
(hardcover); $129.00 (paper). xx ⫹ 284 p.; ill.;
author and subject indexes. ISBN: 978-1-621820-
84-0 (hc); 978-1-621820-85-7 (pb). [A companion
website is available.] 2013.
Adrenaline.
By Brian B. Hoffman. Cambridge (Massachusetts):
Harvard University Press. $24.95. v ⫹ 298 p.; ill.;
index. ISBN: 978-0-674-05088-4. 2013.
Fatal Flaws: How a Misfolded Protein Baffled
Scientists and Changed the Way We Look at
the Brain.
By Jay Ingram. New Haven (Connecticut): Yale Univer-
sity Press. $30.00. ix ⫹ 282 p.; ill.; index. ISBN:
978-0-300-18989-6. [Published with assistance
from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund.] 2013.
MISCELLANEOUS
Mathematical Tools for Understanding Infec-
tious Disease Dynamics. Princeton Series in Theoreti-
cal and Computational Biology.
By Odo Diekmann, Hans Heesterbeek, and Tom Britton.
Princeton (New Jersey): Princeton University Press.
$90.00. xiv ⫹ 502 p.; ill.; index. ISBN: 978-0-691-
15539-5. 2013.