Doug Moe

×

Expand

Miriam Bulcher

A close-up of Doug Moe.

Doug Moe

The man who regularly interviews writers at Mystery to Me events will take a spot in the other chair when Madison journalist and author Doug Moe sits down with fellow local journalist and author Stuart Levitan to discuss Moe’s latest book, Saving Hearts and Killing Rats: Karl Paul Link and the Discovery of Warfarin. Moe tells the fascinating story of the UW-Madison biochemist who developed a powerful rodenticide and life-saving human anticoagulant called warfarin, which was famously administered to President Dwight D. Eisenhower after a heart attack in 1955. Saving Hearts and Killing Rats also recently was named “Wisconsin Book of the Month” by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. This event is free, but seating is limited and registration is recommended; it also will be livestreamed via Crowdcast.

media release: Can’t make it in person? Watch the Livestream Here!

About the Book: It started in February 1933 when a Wisconsin farmer brought a dead cow and a bucket of cow's blood to the lab of a young University of Wisconsin biochemist named Karl Paul Link. The farmer's cows were dying mysteriously. Their blood would not clot.

Over the next two decades, Link and his team solved the mystery, and in doing so, developed a powerful rodenticide and life-saving human anticoagulant called warfarin, which was famously administered to President Dwight Eisenhower after a heart attack.

At the center of the story is Karl Paul Link – brilliant, outspoken, controversial, humorous – a colorful anti-authoritarian who twice received the Lasker Award, an honor for medical investigators second only to the Nobel Prize.

This biography traces Link's life from humble Indiana beginnings to the labs and lecture halls where he made his name – and 20th-century medical history.

About the author: Doug Moe has worked as a journalist in Wisconsin for more than four decades. He has authored more than a dozen books.