("The Silk Roads", "The Vaccine Race")

By Peter Frankopan. I stopped somewhere during the rise of Islam.

* Buddism developed idols to compete with outside religions.
* In Rome, Seneca complained about silk being too decadent.
* Emperor Trajan is the one who invaded deep into Persa;
E. Valerian is the one who was used as footstool and later stuffed;
E. Dolectian retired to Split and grew prize cabbages; and also persecuted Christians;
E. Constantine is the one who founded the new city and went with the new religion.
* 402 A.D. to fight Hunds from steppes (climate change), Rome and Persia formed alliance and built a great wall.
* Halo is common to Christian, Buddism, Zoroastrians.

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Meredith Wadman sometimes goes on too long when reporting the spread of some epidemics (x cases in place A, y cases in place B...)

* the discovery that human cells can't grow and divide indefinitely in cell culture and the proof of it (by putting old male cells and new female cells in the same culture)
* the discovery by an Australian opthamologist that cataracts and other birth defects are linked to rubella
* "If it weren’t for a meeting at a conference, Elizabeth Blackburn might not have heard of Alexei Olovnikov’s little-known theory of cellular aging and connected them to her work on telomeres."
* the old method of using monkey kidney cells to grow vaccines