In 1927, the Mississippi River swept across an area roughly equal in size to Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Vermont combined, leaving water as deep as thirty feet on the land stretching from Illinois and Missouri south to the Gulf of Mexico. Close to a million people - in a nation of 120 million - were forced out of their homes. Some estimates place the death toll in the thousands. The Red Cross fed nearly 700,000 refugees for months....

"In the winter of 1918, the coldest the American Midwest had ever endured, history's most lethal influenza virus was born. Over the next year it flourished, killing as many as 100 million people. It killed more people in twenty-four weeks than AIDS has killed in twenty-four years, more people in a year than the Black Death of the Middle Ages killed in a century. There were many echoes of the Middle Ages in 1918: victims turned blue-black and priests...

The great moments of scientific discovery all too often occur in the far reaches of the laboratory, hidden from the public eye. Rarely do readers have an opportunity to comprehend the exhilaration and sense of awe scientists feel as they finally make a breakthrough in understanding the complex web of nature. The Transformed Cell changes all that. Dr. Steven Rosenberg, one of the world's leading surgeons, provides an extraordinary glimpse inside the...