Clive Cookson

Seven years ago Michel Roccati swerved to avoid an animal while riding his motorbike near Turin and smashed into a roadside bench. The crash “exploded the bones in my back”, Roccati says, severing his spinal cord and cutting all communication between his brain and legs. “My doctors told me then that I would never be able to stand again, let alone walk,” says Roccati, who is 32. Then he activates a series of electrodes that neurosurgeons in Lausanne threaded along his spinal cord in a pioneering…

Breaking Through: My Life in Science by Katalin Karikó (Bodley Head) Karikó’s remarkable journey from childhood in a politically suspect butcher’s family on the plains of postwar Hungary to winning a Nobel Prize for medicine last year is a joy to read. She writes in a direct style rich in personal details while explaining well the science behind her research, particularly the fight over more than 30 years to prove that messenger RNA could play an important role in medicine. Why We Die: The New…

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