Product Description: These are the reflections of a nonagenarian polymath describing the shift from a fifty-year-long career as a world-famous chemist to a subsequent twenty-five-year immersion in "science-in-fiction" and "science-in-theater," which is virtually unique among contemporary scientists...read more

Product Description: BOOKS IN SPANISH

Product Description: Carl Djerassi crafts a shrewd collection of comedies of manners, exposing the foibles of elite tribes—business executives, chefs, scientists, professors, musicians, and other clever characters. They spar in battles of one-upmanship using class, education, gender, or prestige as their weapons, sometimes leaving damaged bystanders in their wake but sometimes finding their superiority deflated by unexpected turns of events...read more

Product Description: This book examines the questions "What can science do for the theatre?" and "What can the theatre do for science?" which raise challenges for both theatre professionals and scientists. Unusually, this book deals with plays first and foremost as reading material -- as texts to be read alone or in dramatic readings -- rather than emphasizing performances on the stage...read more

Product Description: Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno were intellectual giants of the first half of the twentieth century. The drama Foreplay explores their deeply human and psychologically intriguing private lives, focusing on professional and personal jealousies, the mutual dislike of Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, the association between Walter Benjamin and Georges Bataille, and the border between erotica and pornography...read more

Product Description: This book features a CD of rarely performed music, including a specially commissioned rap by Erik Weiner of Walter Benjamin's "Thesis on the Philosophy of History." Theodor W. Adorno was the prototypical German Jewish non-Jew, Walter Benjamin vacillated between German Jew and Jewish German, Gershom Scholem was a committed Zionist, and Arnold Schönberg converted to Protestantism for professional reasons but later returned to Judaism...read more

Product Description: El volumen reúne una serie de cuentos de temas que siempre han sido del interés del autor: la comida ("Noblesse oblige"), el sexo ("La investigación"), el arte ("El futurista"), la ópera ("El gran atraco de Glyndebourne"), la camaradería humana ("Maskenfreiheit"), los juegos de palabras ("Los Cantos del Toyota") y, por supuesto, la ciencia ("Cómo derroté a Coca-Cola")...read more

Carl Djerassi is one of “the fathers of the Pill”—he was awarded the National Medal of Science for the first synthesis of a steroid oral contraceptive—and has had a prolific additional career as a writer of fiction, plays, and dialogues about science. In these two plays, ICSI and Taboos, he dramatizes the social transformations and contested viewpoints created by advances in reproductive science and technology.            Two of the most startling developments in contemporary science have radically disrupted the historical connection between sex and reproduction: in vitro fertilization and intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI)—an assisted reproductive technique that directly injects a single sperm into an egg. The word play ICSI—designed for classroom readings—presents, in the format of a contentious talk-show dialogue, the science of direct-injection fertilization and the ethical issues connected with it. A DVD included in the book provides video of the ICSI injection process as viewed through a microscope, to be used in performances of the ICSI one-act dialogue. Taboos, a full-length play,turns the screws on characters that reflect a polarized America. Two couples—lesbian partners and a conservative husband and wife struggling with infertility—must make choices in a drama that examines the disjunction of sexual reproduction and the physical act of sex.

Product Description: Dr. Melanie Laidlaw is a woman scientist developing the first use of ICSI, short for intracytoplasmic sperm injection. Her colleague and collaborator, Dr. Felix Krankenthaler, turns out to have his own ideas about how to best implement their pioneering procedure...read more

"What purpose is served by showing that England's greatest natural philosopher is flawed ...like other mortals?" asks one of the characters in Newton's Darkness. "We need unsullied heroes!" But what if the hero is sullied? At stake is an issue that is as germane today as it was 300 years ago: a scientist's ethics must not be divorced from scientific accomplishments. There is probably no other scientist of whom so many biographies and other historical analyses have been published than Isaac Newton -- all of them in the standard format of documentary prose because of their didactic purpose to transmit historical information. Newton's Darkness, however, illuminates the darker aspects of Newton's persona through two historically grounded plays dealing with two of the bitterest struggles in the history of science. The name of Isaac Newton appears in virtually every survey of the public's choice for the most important persons of the second millennium. Yet the term "darkness" can be applied to much of Newton's personality. Adjectives that have been used to describe facets of his personality include "remote", "lonely", "secretive", "introverted", "melancholic", "humorless", "puritanical", "cruel", "vindictive" and, perhaps worst of all, "unforgiving". The trait most relevant to the present book is Newton's obsessively competitive nature, which was often out of proportion to the warranted facts, as demonstrated in three of Newton's best-known bitter conflicts: with the physicist Robert Hooke, the astronomer royal John Flamsteed, and a German contemporary of almost equal intellectual prowess, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz -- the last fight eventually turning into an England vs Continental Europe competition. It is two of these three relentless drawn-out battles that are illuminated in Newton's Darkness in the form of historically grounded drama. After a summary of the historical evidence, the book starts with the Newton-Hooke struggle (Chapter 2), which was conducted mano a mano, and is then followed by little-known aspects of the Newton-Leibniz confrontation (Chapter 3), which was fought largely through surrogates -- notably the infamous, anonymous committee of 11 Fellows of the Royal Society.

On the fiftieth anniversary of his monumental contribution to human family planning, the controversial inventor of the 'pill' reflects on half a century of effective birth control and looks ahead to the much-touted male pill.

A novel based on the biotech industry follows an international cast of characters working to produce and market a drug to help erectile disfunction. Reprint.

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Product Description: Creador de la píldora anticonceptiva, Carl Djerassi ha sabido combinar su papel de científico con el de escritor. Cultivador de la novela científica o ciencia en ficción, como prefiere llamar a lo que escribe, nos entrega en esta obra - escrita con base en diálogos, como un texto teatral - una reflexión en torno a la biología reproductiva...read more

Product Description: Creador de la píldora anticonceptiva, Carl Djerassi ha sabido combinar su papel de científico con el de escritor. Cultivador de la novela científica o ciencia en ficción, como prefiere llamar a lo que escribe, en Marx, el difunto rompe por un momento con el proyecto literario que ha desarrollado...read more