One Nerve to Change the World

Lively scientific journalism for a general audience á la Gut by Mary Roach and Breath by James Nestor, One Nerve to Change the World is a detective and adventure story about the history and future of medicine, investigating how the vagus—a super nerve people can’t stop talking about—illuminates the mind-body connection and stands to help treat everything from depression and autoimmune disorders to epilepsy and obesity.

As nerves go, the vagus is an unusual one, a cranial nerve, thick as a guitar string, which skips the spinal cord and shoots directly out of the brain and into the body in a little divot between the jugular vein and carotid artery. Also known as cranial nerve X, the vagus is involved in a vast cosmology of what it means to be human: learning, reward processing, emotional regulation, pain management, control of inflammation, autoimmune disorders, the cardiovascular system, mental health, breathing, sugar homeostasis, energy balance, fainting, the gastrointestinal system, and consciousness (among other things). It was, in the late 1800s, “the thing to study” in physiology labs around the world. But then it fizzled as an important topic in science.

For more than a century, the vagus nerve has hovered on the periphery of nearly every subscience that might be interested in it, including neuroscience, psychiatry, neurology, gastroenterology, hepatology, cardiology, and pulmonology. Now it’s back. The vagus is rapidly becoming a body part of immense interest across nearly every subdivision of modern medicine. The National Institutes of Health, the largest funding organization for medical research in the United States, has spent millions on vagus mapping initiatives since the 2010s. Gadgets that stimulate it have been approved by the FDA to treat epilepsy, depression, obesity, motor weakness after stroke, rheumatoid arthritis, migraine, and cluster headaches. But how did a nerve that is so promising, so critical, so potentially revolutionary, come to be forgotten by science, and why has it returned now?

One Nerve to Change the World is a bold expedition into the history and future of medicine, told through a single revolutionary nerve, examining why we ask the questions we ask and receive the answers we receive. Journalist Jacqueline Detwiler-George, who abandoned work in neuroscience to work as a reporter, takes readers along as she visits labs, military bases, aquariums, and field research locations all over the world to find out all there is to know about this new frontier in medicine and wellness.