Archibald Garrod and the individuality of man

One of the book's strengths is to discuss less-cited examples: the Shah of Persia, for instance, whose plans to modernize his country foundered with his leukaemia, concealed from all except the French secret service (was this why France supported the Ayatollah Khomeini?); or Ferdinand Marcos, whose systemic lupus erythematosus and renal failure led to a repressive regime largely dominated by his wife, Imelda, who may have ordered the assassination of Corazon Aquino's husband. And in even more totalitarian states the results of paranoia have been horrendous: 100-300,000 people killed during Idi Amin's reign in Uganda and 40-50,000 in Marcias Nguenna's in Equatorial Guinea. After J. F. Kennedy's assassination, the USA passed the Twenty-fifth Amendment to deal with any future incapacity of a President. Though not invoked-and mentioning neither the words medical nor physician-it remains, the authors say, a model of precision compared with provisions elsewhere. Nevertheless, our best safeguard is a free investigative press. In the midst of a financial crisis in 1893 President Grover Cleveland was "taking a pleaure cruise", but was in fact on the boat having a (successful) removal of cancer of the palate. A newspaper report was convincingly repudiated and the truth did not emerge until 1928. We have come a long way. To write the biography of a distinguished scientist is no easy task. It requires a detailed understanding of the scientific achievements of the subject of the biography, as well as a facility with words that is capable of creating a work not only of scientific history but also of literature. If in addition the scientist was a medical man, then the biography requires an understanding of the closed world of medicine, its ideals and its practice. has found an admirable biographer with all these attributes. This account of the first individual in Britain to bring biochemistry and genetics to the bedside is remarkable for its understanding of not only Garrod the man, deeply afflicted in his later years by the loss of his three sons as a result of the horrors of the First World War and its aftermath, but also the clinical scientist whose studies of inborn errors of metabolism such as alkaptonuria, cystinuria, pentosuria and glycosuria so clearly demonstrated the link between Mendelian genetics and human disease. Even after his election to the Fellowship of the Royal Society at the age of fifty-two, many of his colleagues regarded his work on …