Goetz ’90 brings ‘The Remedy’ to campus

Thomas Goetz, author of a new history that traces the intersecting careers of Arthur Conan Doyle and the scientist who showed the world that germs cause disease, offers a lecture at Bates at 7:30 p.m. Monday, April 28, at the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

Sponsored by the Purposeful Work Initiative at Bates, the event is open to the public at no cost. A booksigning follows the talk. For more information, please contact 207-786-6128 or mcowan@bates.edu.

The next evening, April 29, Goetz will appear with Bates President Clayton Spencer at a college event in Chicago, where the pair will discuss technology-driven innovations in higher education.

The Bates talk by Goetz, a member of the college’s class of 1990, is titled From Science to Society: How the Germ Theory Helped Create Sherlock Holmes. He’ll discuss The Remedy, newly released by Gotham Books, which traces both how Dr. Robert Koch discovered the connection between microbes and disease — particularly tuberculosis — and Koch’s influence on a provincial English doctor, Conan Doyle.

From his office in southern England, Conan Doyle admired the work of microbiologist Koch in Berlin, eventually adapting his scientific methods into his stories — most prominently, a new detective story featuring a character named Sherlock Holmes.

The Remedy, wrote Kirkus Reviews, is “a beguiling real-life medical detective story.” The Washington Independent Review of Books called it “a must-read for fans of medical history.” The Remedy was chosen as a Best Book of the Month by iTunes and Amazon.

Goetz is also the author of The Decision Tree: Taking Control of Your Health in the New Era of Personalized Medicine (Rodale Books), selected as Best Health Book of 2010 by the Wall Street Journal.

The former executive editor at WIRED Magazine, Goetz is an entrepreneur and healthcare innovator as well as a writer. Co-founder of Iodine, a technology company researching ways to help consumers make better health decisions, Goetz also is entrepreneur-in-residence at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a philanthropy devoted singularly to the public’s health.

Goetz was the executive producer for the award-winning Discovery Channel documentary Earth 2050: The Future of Energy.

Goetz holds two master’s degrees, one in public health from the University of California, Berkeley, and one in American literature from the University of Virginia.