Information is accruing at an astonishing rate in fields such as immunology, molecular biology, and cell biology. This information has important implications for human health, and underlies one of the most exciting developments in human health in this century: molecular medicine. The public should have access to this information, and that is the goal of all of my books. I believe this information can be presented in a lively, engaging and informative manner. I have always tried to do this in my lectures at UCLA, as well as in the textbooks I have written, and I have made this my goal in books that I write for the general public. All of my popular books assume no particular background in science, including biology. They are not textbooks for science professionals; everything is explained from the ground up.

In At War Within, I describe how scientists discovered our immune systems, and how its various components function. I explore some of the ways in which the immune system works to defend us, as in the case of infectious diseases, but also how it sometimes fails (as with cancer or AIDS), gets in the way (in the case of organ transplants) or actually harms us (allergy and autoimmune disease, among other examples). It's important to know that although we couldn't possibly survive without an immune system, like any other weapon it can also cause harm under the wrong circumstances.

Perhaps my favorite among the books I have written so far, Sex and the Origins of Death explores a question that has always fascinated me: Where did death come from? Is it an inescapable consequence of life? The short answer to the latter question for us, unfortunately, is yes. But tracing the roots of death back to its evolutionary origins is a fascinating journey, and tells us as much about life itself as about death. I enjoyed this journey, and hope you will find the book as fascinating to read as I did to write.

The New Healers describes the birth and recent growth of the exciting new field of molecular medicine. Molecular medicine is a natural outgrowth of the understanding we have gained through biochemistry and molecular genetics about how living systems function. Doctors are already applying molecular medicine in the diagnosis and treatment of disease. Proteins such as insulin, produced from human genes inserted into bacteria, are used to treat patients on a daily basis. Techniques to replace defective genes that cause disease are also being used to attack cancer and AIDS, and over 200 gene therapy trials are now underway. DNA taken from disease-causing microbes can now be used as potent new vaccines. The Human Genome Project will soon be completed and will provide us with the sequence of every single gene underlying human health and illness. Molecular medicine will be a major part of our lives in the new millennium; it is essential that each of us learn what it is, what it can do for us, and what its limitations are. This book is an excellent place to begin.

A Means To An End is an extension of Sex and the Origins of Death, examining the cellular and molecular mechanisms that underlie aging and death. Aging is obviously a very complex condition, affecting every cell and tissue in the body. While there has long been evidence that aging (and ultimately death) are under some sort of genetic control, many researchers have been reluctant to pursue this, believing that the very complexity of these phenomena would make genetic analysis fruitless. But now molecular biologists are finding that, like many other apparently complex phenomena (cancer, for example), the number of genes underlying aging and death may be fewer than previously suspected. Moreover, most of these genes are extremely old, in an evolutionary sense. The need to dispose of nonreproductive DNA (and the cells that house it) appears to be an ancient problem, dating as far back as our single-cell ancestors.

Are We Hardwired: The Role of Genes in Human Behavior is an attempt to bring some balance back to the question of the role of genes in human behavior. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the excesses of eugenics drove many scientists from the field of human genetics, and set back for many decades progress in understanding fully why we are the way we are. Research in the latter half of the 20th century once again took up the challenge of exploring the role of genes in every aspect of human biology, including behavior. The systematic exploration of behavior in identical and fraternal twins, and in biological and adopted siblings, together with a better understanding of the cellular and chemical basis of brain function, has lead to startlingly new insights into the role of both genes and environment in shaping human behavior. With completion of the Human Genome Project, and the anticipated unravelling of not only the identity but the function and interactions of all 25-30,000 human genes, we stand at the edge of a radical change in how we will view our selves as biological organisms in the future. But this knowledge comes at the expense of being faced with some of the most profound ethical challenges we have ever known as a species. This book is an attempt to place these issues into a context that all intelligent readers can understand, in language that will clarify and inform rather than confuse.

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