New Delhi, Mar 10 (IANS): This is a mesmerizing biography of a brilliant and eccentric surgeon and his quest to transplant the human soul.

In the early days of the Cold War, a spirit of desperate scientific rivalry birthed a different kind of space race: not the race to outer space that we all know, but a race to master the inner space of the human body.

Dr. Robert White was a friend to two popes and a founder of the Vatican's Commission on Bioethics. He developed lifesaving neurosurgical techniques still used in hospitals today and was nominated for the Nobel Prize. But, like Dr. Jekyll before him, Dr. White had another identity.

In his lab, he was waging a battle against the limits of science, and against mortality itself - working to perfect a surgery that would allow the soul to live on after the human body had died.

"Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher" (Simon & Schuster) follows his decades-long quest into tangled matters of science, global politics, and faith, revealing the complex (and often murky) ethics of experimentation and remarkable innovations that today save patients from certain death.

It's an enthralling tale that offers a window into our greatest fears and our greatest hopes - and the long, strange journey from science fiction to science fact. Not to forget the unattainable!

The author, Brandy Schillace is a historian of medicine and the critically acclaimed writer of "Death's Summer Coat: What Death and Dying Teach Us About Life" and "Living and Clockwork Futures: The Science of Steampunk". The Editor-in-Chief of the journal "Medical Humanities", she previously worked as a professor of literature and in research and public engagement at the Dittrick Medical History Center and Museum, in Cleaveland.