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'Using Nature's Shuttle' is a suspenseful, by turns comic or tragic, but always lively account of how young, idealistic scientists - often the first of their families to go to a university - engaged in basic research that led them to make history in the new fields of plant microbiology and molecular biology. The book passes on the true story of what young scientists in a public Belgian university learned about a million-year-old single cell soil bacterium. This bacterium was able to genetically modify certain plants to produce food that only that bacterium strain could eat. These scientists and their colleagues and rivals figured out how to use that knowledge to genetically modify a variety of plants to make them safer and healthier for man, beast, and the environment. Their genetic modifications made plants cheaper and easier for farmers to grow as well as capable of improving the health and welfare of people in the Third World. The author, Judith M. Heimann, a former diplomat and writer of three published non-fiction books and contributor to two TV documentaries based on them, tells this multi-sided story chiefly through the information she gathered by conducting intensive interviews of each of more than two dozen of the scientists involved. She sees this book as presenting the actual science, as opposed to the current rash of anti-science on this subject, and as encouraging a new generation of young people to opt for careers in STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics subjects).

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9789086863303

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Judith M. Heimann, a New Yorker by birth, and a Harvard graduate in English literature, comes from a family of writers, mostly journalists. She has lived much of her adult life in Europe, Asia, and Africa as an American diplomat and diplomat’s wife; their two children were born abroad. She worked more than twenty years as a diplomat in Benelux countries. She speaks French, Dutch, and Indonesian/Malay. Heimann’s three previous full-length books, all nonfiction, tackle disparate topics. Her best-known book, The airmen and the headhunters (Harcourt Publishers, 2007) was made into a Hugo award-winning TV documentary she helped write that was nominated for an Emmy. Based on Heimann’s interviews of all the surviving airmen and headhunters, the book relates how generous and courteous Borneo headhunters could be to helpless American airmen shot down over Borneo’s tribal land during the last year of World War II. Heimann’s first book, The most offending soul alive: Tom Harrisson and his remarkable life (University of Hawaii Press, 1999; Aurum Press, 2nd edition, 2002) was also made into a TV documentary, for the BBC, presented by Sir David Attenborough. Heimann’s third book, Paying calls in Shangri-La: scenes from a woman’s life in American diplomacy (Ohio University Press, 2016) was nominated for the American Academy of Diplomacy’s annual prize for the best book on the art of diplomacy. All four of her books have in common, aside from their overturning of various accepted popular misconceptions regarding their subjects, Heimann’s intense focus on getting the people she interviews to think hard about their past. Inviting them to remember what they saw, did, and felt when they were young and the world was new, she gets them to recall for her fascinating, revealing, and relevant stories.

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