A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Stockholm

December 7, 2020
Physician and biochemist Lefkowitz debuts with a spirited account of his path from growing up in the Bronx in the 1950s to winning the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2012. A self-described “accidental scientist,” Lefkowitz was inspired to study medicine at age 12 when his father suffered a heart attack; by age 19, he had graduated from college and begun medical school. Lefkowitz recounts a pivotal lesson he learned in his third-year—“Data are just data. A story is something you impose on the data”—and how it came to inform the way he practiced medicine: closely listening to his patients’ stories became his hallmark. After medical school, Lefkowitz joined the faculty at Duke, where he mentored Brian Kobilka; their work on DNA proteins won them the Nobel Prize. He and Kobilka were “treated like rock stars” during the weeklong Nobel celebration, of which he notes:“There is nothing in the United States that compares to the Nobel Day events in Sweden.” Though the narrative gets occasionally bogged down in scientific terminology, this vivid tale mostly shines with personality. Rarely has science been treated with such a winning blend of humor and humanity.

January 1, 2021
Lefkowitz grew up wanting to be a doctor, not a scientist. But life took him down some unexpected paths and his pioneering research identifying the nature and structure of beta receptors won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2012. An avid and inveterate storyteller, he chronicles his life in medicine and science. Well on his way to becoming a cardiologist, he found himself drawn to the world of medical research, where he contributed to groundbreaking discoveries for more than 40 years, and became one of the field's great mentors. Told with humor and humility, what shines through most is his love of stories. This book came about because of his penchant for sharing tales about his life, but he also argues for the central importance of storytelling in both patient care and scientific research: knowing a patient's story is essential to understanding their ailments, and research data doesn't mean anything without a story to make sense of it. His passion for science and discovery, for helping people, and for celebrating stories is infectious.

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