Welcome to a revolution in the science of you! This landmark new book from award-winning scientist Daniel M. Davis explores the future of the human body.
Imagine taking drugs to help you acquire new skills, or knowing years in advance the precise likelihood of developing specific cancers, or following a diet and health regime tailored to your microbiome, or even having continuous monitoring of your body’s workings and well-being.
Written by an award-winning scientist, this landmark book shows how these radical and disconcerting possibilities have been made real. It is at once a gripping drama of scientific ingenuity, discovery and collaboration, and a vision of the human body of dizzying complexity and wonder.
Praise
‘A perfect blend of cutting-edge science and compelling storytelling. Daniel Davis has a rare knack for making complex science comprehensible and thrilling’
Bill Bryson
‘An extraordinary journey that reveals the magnificence, intricacy and beauty of the human body, fundamentally changing the way we see ourselves. Masterful’
Alice Roberts
‘A beautifully rendered picture of the startling new discoveries in human biology which are radically altering our picture of how we function and what our future holds.’
Brian Cox
‘What we now know about the human body would seem magical to people just a hundred years ago. This book by Daniel Davis takes us on a grand voyage to see how we reached our current state of understanding. It interweaves the invention of very clever tools with the great and amazing discoveries they made possible to cover every aspect of ourselves, from the amazing types of the trillion cells in us, how we get started from a single cell, to the amazing connections formed in our brains that allow us to think, and the microbes that live in us and are part of us. At the same time Davis tells us the very human stories of the many scientists who made these discoveries possible, including the ones who never got the fame they deserved. The book often reads like a detective story and anyone interested in modern biology will both enjoy it and learn much from it. Certainly I did.’
Venki Ramakrishnan
‘The thing that amazes me about Daniel Davis’ writing is that even as a physician and an academic I get so much out of it. With this book Davis joins the pantheon of truly great communicators – he unpacks the science not simply as dogma or as a set of fixed facts but rather the way it should be explained – as a series of experiments undertaken by extraordinary people interpreted in context. This is a stunning book that everyone who has a body will love. Whether you’re an interested lay person, a scientist or a doctor this book will change the way you think about yourself and the people around you.’
Chris van Tulleken
‘A big-picture forecast of how medicine stands on the threshold of a revolution that will radically change all of our lives … Davis is a polar opposite of the typecast propeller-hatted futurologist. He is beguilingly informal and affably humorous’
The Times
‘Reading The Secret Body is like spending time with an eloquent, well-connected and entertaining enthusiast who has intimate knowledge of the secret worlds that lie within all of us’
Roger Highfield
‘Dazzling discoveries in expert hands.’
Kirkus Reviews
‘an elegantly written and splendidly concise Cook’s Tour of the frontiers of medical biology. It is also an engrossing account of the progress of science: how science proceeds in fits and starts, and why science is often messy and unfair.’
John J Ross, Wall Street Journal
‘Brilliant’
Tim Spector