Extremes: Life, Death and the Limits of the Human Body

EXTREMES is a book about life: its fragility, its fractal beauty and its resilience. In it, I will explore what it means to be alive by looking at life's boundaries - at the human body's response when tested by the extremes of heat and cold, vacuum and altitude, age and disease - and show how science, technology and medicine have taken what was once lethal in the world and made it survivable. Chapter by chapter, I will examine the frontiers that medicine has challenged and overcome in the last century. This is a book about medicine, but it is also about exploration in its broadest sense - and about how, by probing the very limits of our biology, we may ultimately return with a better appreciation of how our bodies work, of what life is, and what it means to be human.