Brian B. Hoffman is currently a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a physician in the VA Boston Healthcare System. He has had a long-standing interest in adrenergic pharmacology and has recently completed Adrenaline, a book about the history of adrenaline.

Adrenaline was discovered in 1894 and quickly made its way out of the lab into clinics around the world. In this engrossing account, Brian Hoffman examines adrenaline in all its capacities, from a vital regulator of physiological functions to the subject of Nobel Prize-winning breakthroughs. Because its biochemical pathways are prototypical, adrenaline has had widespread application in hormone research leading to the development of powerful new drugs. Hoffman introduces the scientists to whom we owe our understanding, tracing the paths of their discoveries and aspirations and allowing us to appreciate the crucial role adrenaline has played in pushing modern medicine forward. He also investigates the vivid, at times lurid, place adrenaline occupies in the popular imagination, where accounts of its life-giving and lethal properties often leave the realm of fact.

Additional information is available at the publisher's website: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674050884.