Billy's Halo - Softcover

Ruth Mckernan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0552777919 ISBN 13: 9780552777919

Publisher: Transworld Publishers, 2011

Synopsis

Science is just one way of looking at life. As a neuroscientist working at the forefront of medical research it is Ruth McKernan's way. When her father, Billy, succumbed to a mystery illness and slipped from consciousness into coma, Ruth watched his life ebb away with a mixture of love and terror. She struggled for control by using her scientific knowledge to analyse his medical condition.In this moving account of her father's last year, love, grief and hope are intertwined with a crystal-clear scientific explanation of the way our brains and bodies work. The result is an inspired blend where the contrasting view of scientist and daughter ultimately unite.

About this title

About the Author

Ruth McKernan is a Vice President of Drug Discovery for a multinational pharmaceutical company and a visiting professor at London's Institute of Psychiatry. She is an internationally recognized neuroscientist whose talent for making complex science interesting, entertaining and understandable earned her the Glaxo/ABSW Science Writers' Award for her articles in the Independent. Ruth lives with her husband and two children near Canterbury in Kent.

From Publishers Weekly

This unique hybrid of memoir and science writing offers a remarkably intimate portrait of a British neuroscientist confronted with the tangible experience of modern science. McKernan was working for a major pharmaceutical company when her father became ill with a mysterious infection, and she repeatedly draws on her scientific training as she describes her father's illness and eventual death, taking refuge in the knowledge of what biology and neuroscience can now explain while wrestling with the questions still left unanswered. As a memoirist, McKernan holds nothing back, sharing her experiences both as a devoted daughter and as a scientist; the result is hugely compelling, nimbly shifting back and forth from micro to macro (she juxtaposes, for instance, a biological description of cell necrosis with the emotional consequences of watching a loved one slip away day by day). A reader will turn the last page with a clear sense of what modern science can tell us about life, death and consciousness, but the knowledge almost seems incidental; what sticks most is the nuanced and wrenchingly real experience of loss that no amount of scientific knowledge can buffer. (June)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Transworld Publishers
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0552777919
• ISBN 13: 9780552777919
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368