An Arrow's Arc: Journey of a Physician-Scientist

Book excerpt: "A well-rendered portrait of an intense medical life devoted to equally intense research."—Kirkus Reviews “This is a wonderful account of a nonpareil physician-scientist and, in recent decades, a creator of drug therapies and a lifesci macher. Carl Nathan illuminates his memoir with great storytelling and deeply considered reflections (regularly summed up in pithy ‘life lessons’) on how his person and his personal journey prepared, and propelled, him. Like Carl, I am a scientist whose asthma and serial pneumonias meant swapping a lot of childhood companionship for finding out young how rewarding adventures of the mind can be. An Arrow’s Arc belongs on your bookshelf right next to Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”—Professor K. Barry Sharpless, PhD, Scripps Research Institute, two-time winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry As a physician and renowned medical researcher, Carl Nathan has been at the forefront of discoveries in microbiology and immunology. In An Arrow’s Arc, he reflects on how his youthful experiences and passions moved him toward medicine and science, and how his five decades as a doctor and scientist have, in turn, shaped him. As a child, Nathan struggled with severe asthma, and he saw breast cancer take his mother’s life during his senior year of college, on the very same day he was accepted to Harvard Medical School. These experiences, among others, fueled his abiding interest in medicine and his determined efforts to understand how the immune system duels with cancer and infectious diseases. While a half-century dedicated to his patients and to biomedical research provided Dr. Nathan with a hard-won biological perspective on death’s role in life, he’s known since he was young that he could die at any time. He calls this a liberating thought, a gift, a call to action. Full of warmth and wisdom, An Arrow’s Arc is a beautiful reminder to all of us “that now is the time to love, to wonder, and to build.”