-
Access Our
Best Book Club
Books of 2025!
Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Thomas Goetz is a noted science journalist and healthcare innovator. The entrepreneur-in-residence at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, he is also co-founder of the health technology company, Iodine. The former executive editor of WIRED, his writing has been selected repeatedly for the Best American Science Writing and Best American Technology Writing anthologies.
Thomas holds a Master of Public Health degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Master's degree in American literature from the University of Virginia. He graduated from Bates College, where he learned to juggle five balls at once (he's since back down to three). He lives in San Francisco.
Thomas Goetz's website
This bio was last updated on 05/08/2014. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.
What is the Germ Theory, and why was it so important?
The Germ Theory is the hypothesis that many diseases are caused by microbes, not by the body itself or by some other cause such as miasma – bad air. The idea that some diseases were pathogenic or contagious had been around for centuries, but it wasn't until Louis Pasteur in the 1860s and then Robert Koch in the 1870s that enough evidence was marshaled to make the argument convincing. In particular, it was Koch, with his Postulates – a series of conditions that must be met to prove a microbial cause of disease – who produced a method by which science could definitively establish the cause of disease.
Pasteur and Koch's work on the Germ Theory constitutes the birth of modern medicine, when science finally began to explore the true causes of disease – and therefore to determine vaccines or treatments for those diseases. Once the germ theory was established in laboratories, at last hygienists and social reformers could finally attack the causes of infectious disease, which were by far the leading cause of death in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This insight into causes pushed hygiene forward. Within a few decades, infectious disease was no ...
Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz (b. 1978) was born and raised in Philadelphia. In 1996, she graduated from Central High School of Philadelphia, and moved to New York City to attend NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.
...
(more)
If you enjoyed:
The Remedy
Try:
Dr. Mütter's Marvels
by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz
Julian Barnes was born in Leicester, England on January 19, 1946. He was educated at the City of London School from 1957 to 1964 and at Magdalen College, Oxford, from which he graduated in modern languages (with honors) in ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
The Remedy
Try:
Arthur & George
by Julian Barnes
We recommend 9 similar authors
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
