A riveting account of the little known witch-hunt against the founder of one of the first major integrative medical centers in America. Prime Example tells the story of the State of New York Department of Health versus Warren M. Levin, MD. In the late 1980s, the Commissioner of Health in New York targeted Warren Levin—a board-certified family doctor—in his effort to rid the state of alternative practitioners. Dr. Levin’s practice had never received a complaint from any patient and he had never been sued on the day that the state served a huge set of charges against him. During the ensuing disciplinary proceedings, the state brought in a witness who had spent much of his time testifying against physicians before many government bodies including the US Congress, where he specifically mentioned Dr. Levin as a quack on several occasions. The Levin defense brought in an extraordinary compliment of witnesses on his behalf. Among them was Linus Pauling, PhD, with almost 50 honorary MDs and PhDs. He was at the time he testified—and remains—the only human being to have received two individual Nobel prizes. There were many others, many of them tops in their fields with hefty titles and accomplishments who testified for Levin and much of that testimony is referred to and/or excerpted in Prime Example. This is the real-life story of a man being persecuted for daring to diverge from mainstream medical practices and of the abuse of power by a health commissioner driven by private and political motives.
Many modern geneticists attempt to elucidate the molecular basis of phenotype by utilizing a battery of techniques derived from physical chemistry on subcellular components isolated from various species of organisms. Volume 5 of the Handbook of Genetics provides explanations of the advantages and shortcomings of some of these revolutionary tech niques, and the nonspecialist is alerted to key research papers, reviews, and reference works. Much of the text deals with the structure and func tioning of the molecules bearing genetic information which reside in the nucleus and with the processing of this information by the ribosomes resid ing in the cytoplasm of eukaryotic cells. The mitochondria, which also live in the cytoplasm of the cells of all eukaryotes, now appear to be separate little creatures. These, as Lynn Margulis pointed out in Volume 1, are the colonial posterity of migrant prokaryotes, probably primitive bacteria that swam into the ancestral precursors of all eukaryotic cells and remained as symbionts. They have maintained themselves and their ways ever since, replicating their own DNA and transcribing an RNA quite different from that of their hosts. In a similar manner, the chloroplasts in all plants are self-replicating organelles presumably derived from the blue-green algae, with their own nucleic acids and ribosomes. Four chapters are devoted to the nucleic acids and the ribosomal components of both classes of these semi-independent lodgers. Finally, data from various sources on genetic variants of enzymes are tabulated for ready reference, and an evaluation of this information is attempted.
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