Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Mutations and Motives: Eleven Stories Inspired by the Nobel Prize in Medicine Laureates, 1960 to 1969

Mutations and Motives: Eleven Stories Inspired by the Nobel Prize in Medicine Laureates, 1960 to 1969

Alden, Simon

Paperback

Series: The Nobel Medicine Stories: A Decade-By-Decade Short Story, Book 7

Mystery & Thriller

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN13: 9798249965679
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Feb 26 2026
Pages: 186
Weight: 0.56
Height: 0.40 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Mutations and Motives is Book 7 in a 13-book series of interconnected short story collections inspired by the discoveries behind the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In these eleven stories set from 1960 to 1969, biology stops being background and becomes the battleground. It is a decade where breakthroughs move from textbooks into courtrooms, factories, farms, and tribunal chambers, asking what happens when the rules of life become tools people can use.

Inside the stories, scientific ideas serve as pressure points for characters navigating a world where biology is code, filter, switch, and weapon. A rural vet pays a steep economic price for proving that cancer can behave like a contagion, while a courtroom expert witness uses synaptic mechanics to dismantle simplistic narratives of blame. An artist's vision fractures into contrast ghosts, forcing a renegotiation of reality through retinal chemistry, and a tribunal interpreter must choose between fidelity and persuasion when a single genetic triplet changes the meaning of a verdict. From a midwife uncovering an accidental engineering of immune acceptance to an investigator realizing that truth is often obscured by sensory filters, the decade reveals that identity is as much about what the body ignores as what it attacks. The era culminates in an intellectual showdown over whether nature plans its mutations or simply filters the noise of existence.

Woven through these years is a recurring cast moving through a world where proof is often managed for institutional comfort. There is the investigative editor Maisie Fenn, who insists that the real lesson is the fragility of truth under prestige; the observers who recognize when a tidy graph is actually a lie; and the researchers who realize that while nature varies, it is institutions that choose which data get to count. Together, they navigate a decade where discovery does not just save lives. It reshapes the very selves those lives contain.

In these noir-tinted historical medical stories, the real struggle is not with the indifference of nature, but with the motives of men. Nature doesn't plan, but humans do.

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