So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs—and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease

Levenson (Money for Nothing), a professor of science writing at MIT, delivers a penetrating chronicle of humanity’s fight against microorganisms. Among other milestones, he describes how Dutch merchant Antonie van Leeuwenhoek became the first person to identify bacteria after observing the organisms under a microscope he developed to inspect cloth in 1676, how Puritan minister Cotton Mather promoted smallpox inoculations after learning about the practice from an enslaved Berber man in early 18th-century Boston, and how Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928 after returning from a summer holiday and finding penicillium mold growing in a culture plate in his lab. Cultural context enriches the scientific history, as when Levenson argues that the Christian belief that humans lord over the natural world prevented 17th-century thinkers from realizing that recently discovered “animalcules” (germs) could invade the human body and transmit illness. The account concludes with a troubling study of how vaccine misinformation and an overreliance on antibiotics has produced drug-resistant superbugs and led to the reemergence of measles, imperiling hard-won advances in public health (in 2019, 35,000 Americans died “of once treatable microbial diseases,” Levenson notes). Buoyed by the author’s lucid prose, this is a first-rate work of popular science. Photos. Agent: Eric Lupfer, UTA. (Apr.)