The Nobel Legacy--Medicine: How Do You Feel, Mr. Jacobs?

The fastest ways to a man's heart used to be either through his stomach or directly through the rib cage with the medical equivalent of a radial arm saw, but this PBS documentary begins with a look at a new route: through the leg artery. The titular Mr. Jacobs benefits from a kinder, gentler procedure in which a catheter bearing a whirring mini-blade arterial roto-rooter is inserted into the leg and guided to the arteries of the heart, where arteriosclerotic plaque is whisked away. Nobel laureate Dr. J. Michael Bishop ponders this remarkable innovation in a brief introduction, before viewers are introduced to the poet Anne Carson who walks through a graveyard, performs a faintly ridiculous re-enactment of Mary Shelley dreaming up Frankenstein, and generally asserts that we are blurring the boundary between human and machine. A bit confusing, but the next segment--detailing the rise of medical intervention in life and death matters, which were formerly accepted as simply God's will--seemed to underscore the fact that we were indeed engaged in a philosophical ping-pong match to define the rightful dominion of modern medicine. But instead of the poet Carson stepping forward to deliver a powerful backhand smash over the possibility of a future elite society where money literally bought longevity (utilizing expensive biogenetic treatments), the program spends the better part of the second half hour tracing Watson and Crick's race to discover the double helix structure of DNA. A technically excellent production marred only by the fact that it literally can't decide what it's about, this is an optional purchase for junior and senior high school libraries, who might want to use the various body parts--so to speak--as jumping off points for discussion. [Note: two other volumes in The Nobel Legacy series are also available--Chemistry: Stop Forward Movement? and Physics: Why Bother? The entire series is available for $69.98 ($99.95 w/PPR).] (R. Pitman)