The Forgotten Plague is the epic tale of the search for the tuberculosis cure - an extraordinary narrative of human drama, scientific deduction, and original historical documentation. But the story that once ended in triumph now carries a dire warning. For the "old enemy" has resurfaced, linking itself in a deadly, drug-resistant alliance with AIDS - an epidemic that is ravaging the globe and making international headlines.Tuberculosis, once considered a relic from the past, is known as the greatest killer in history, a grim and insidious disease that has claimed more than a billion lives worldwide. Feared even more than the bubonic plague, the "white plague" in the past two centuries has become a symbol of romantic death, an illness shrouded in mystery and tragedy. It robbed generations of the world's most celebrated artists, philosophers, and writers, including Keats, Chopin, Chekhov, and George Orwell - while providing an unparalleled cultural legacy and inspiring such works as La Traviata and Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.Even midway through the twentieth century, no one believed a cure would ever be discovered - no one except a tiny handful of doctors, chemists, and bacteriologists in different corners of the world, who saw their work as a fundamental struggle for human welfare, and who refused to give up their vision. In The Forgotten Plague, Dr. Frank Ryan tells the remarkable story of these men and women: Selman Waksman, who fled czarist Russia to become the world-renowned soil bacteriologist and Nobel laureate; Gerhard Domagk, who continued his heroic experiments in the face of Nazi occupation and the destruction of war; Jorgen Lehmann, an unusual scientist in the mold of Sherlock Holmes, who seized upon the idea that the simplest molecule of aspirin might hold the key to one of the greatest medical mysteries of all time; and Robert Koch, H. Corwin Hinshaw, Karl-Gustav Rosdahl, and the wonderfully entertaining Rene Dubos, among others. Together they halted the course of this ferocious disease. It was a race against time, and an extraordinary detective feat that owed as much to intuition and spontaneous collaboration as to any systematic scientific process. For a while, their victory allowed us to forget their battle.But today, as the human population faces a global time bomb, no story could be more relevant. Read Less