Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law

 I love Mary Roach's books. She combines scientific reporting and respect for researchers and technicians with the sensibilities of the best 5th grade gross out humor. Fuzz:When Nature Breaks the Law covers killer trees, rampaging elephants, marauding bears (committing both property and personal crimes), thieving monkeys, Easter-disrupting gulls, and other wildlife disruptors. Always funny, Roach doesn't have quite as much room for humor with her non-human subjects (and to be honest, I'm not particularly interested in wildlife). Still, I laughed while I learned - or rather, laughed while my "stay away from wild things" attitude was confirmed.

The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease

I've read a bit about vaccines in the past few years (and not all of it for my Regulatory Affairs degree). The Vaccine Race is the most complex of the layman's books I've read, covering not just the development of vaccines for rabies and rubella, but the people involved (with their quirks and territorial issues), the techniques used to develop vaccines and their components, the human cost of failed vaccines, intellectual property, fights with bureaucracy (worsened by an NIH official's view of new techniques), aging, medical ethics (and the lack thereof before the mid 1960s) and how one scientist's bad administrative decision effectively stalled his still formidable contributions to the science. Waldman does a reasonable job of integrating all the threads, and wisely chooses to only highlight Leonard Hayflick, whose work in creating the cell line used in many vaccines and other drugs also created the science of aging, and Stanley Plotkin, who developed the measles and rubella vaccines. Still, the enormity of the task means that some sections feel rushed and I wanted to know more about some of the scientists. 

The World in a Grain

 Our world is built on sand. The concrete foundations of our buildings, the roads on which we drive, the computers that control most of our industry - all require sand in some form or another. It's a common substance, and yet the right kinds of sand are running out. Concrete needs rough grains which lock together and the people who mine this sand are cutthroat and occasionally criminal. The ultra-pure silicates needed for glass (particularly lab glass) computers is the same white sand used in the sand traps on luxury golf courses. Vince Beiser livens what could be a dull subject with interviews with people whose lives have been threatened by sand barons and the story of the first mechanized glass factory. 

The Poison Squad

 I should have enjoyed The Poison Squad more than I did. It had fantastic reviews, Deborah Blum is an excellent writer, and as a chemist-turned-lawyer working on a degree in regulatory affairs, a book on the origins of the FDA is the most "me" book I can think of. And while it was interesting, it never fully captured my attention. Perhaps a bit less about his personal life (he married suffragist Anna Kelton who sounds like she deserves her own biography) and some more details about toxin tests. I suspect, though, that while I'd enjoy that book more, most people would like it less.

Tasty: The Art and Science of What We Eat

John McQuaid's Tasty starts with the discredited taste map of the tongue and travels through super tasters, cultural culinary differences, the Scoville scale and the quest for the world's hottest pepper, our taste for sweetness, and a handful of other topics. It's a good overview of the science and history of what and how we eat, and an almost ideal commute book.

Bad Advice: Or Why Celebrities, Politicians, and Activists Aren't Your Best Source of Health Information

Paul Offit takes a slightly different tack with his latest book, Bad Advice.  He's still crusading against medical quackery and scientific woo, but instead of presenting new cases, he revisits the world of anti-vaxxers and supplement advocates with tips on how to properly argue for science.  There's not much new (other than the news that Andrew Wakefield has been reduced to the conspiracy theorist circuit), but this time Offit explains how he and others have effectively refuted bad science.  Offit also describes some of the dangers (lawsuits, stalking, death threats) that come with fighting for science and against public opinion and has enough of a sense of humor to dissect some of his least successful media appearances - and to admit that the most frightening audience he ever faced was his daughter's 8th grade class.

The Guardian of All Things: The Epic Story of Human Memory

Sometimes a book ends up being even better than expected. That's how I felt about The Guardian of All Things.  I was expecting an analysis of how human memory works, but that was Micael S. Malone's starting point.  From simple memories, he moved into memory tricks, then writing, and eventually into the electronic resources which have allowed us to store simple facts we formerly needed to memorize, freeing our memories for more complex and interesting information. Like an episode of Connections without the puns (Malone mentions the show as one of his inspirations, and that he mapped out his book during a lunch with James Burke) The Guardian of All Things seamlessly linked apparently disparate events as it traveled through history.

The Malaria Project: The US Government's Secret Mission to Find a Miracle Cure

We haven't beaten malaria.  The parasite is too well evolved, too wily.  Surviving an infection only gives a few months of immunity (although initial infections are more likely to affect the brain), and anti-malarial drugs have severe side effects.  The best prevention is to reduce the transmissibility through economic development  But there's a feedback loop in effect - malaria weakens people, sapping their ability to improve their economic status, leaving them in the sort of living conditions that both aid in the transmission of malaria and create a reservoir for the disease.

The Malaria Project starts with an outline of the disease.  There are four human strains, but two are most important, cyclical vivid and the more virulent falciparum.  This old world disease had a new world treatment, quinine, from the bark of the South American chinch tree.  It only saved the patient, though, it did not kill the parasite and left the victim subject to recurrent attacks and left them able to transmit the disease to a neighbor.

19th Century chemistry tried to synthesize quinine from coal tar and failed.  One failure, by William Henry Perkin, created the first artificial dye and kicked off the organic chemistry industry.  Germany led the way, and after WWI, her patents were confiscated by US companies.  WWI also broke down the late 19th Century gains against the parasite.  More troops were infected with malaria than died, and Mediterranean regions which had controlled transmission once found the disease to be endemic.

Malaria had never ceased to be endemic in the American South, and that's where Dr; Lowell Coggshall first joined the fight.  A formerly indifferent student who saw college as an escape from subsistence farming in Iowa, he worked for the Rockefeller Institute, measuring parasite loads in children and adults and pouring toxic Paris Green on stagnant ponds to kill mosquito larvae.  Along with experienced malariologists Samuel Darling and Paul Russell, he made headway but malaria wasn't truly controlled until the TVA brought electricity, running water, and jobs to the area.

While Coggshell was fighting malaria win the US, a German doctor, Julius Wagner-Jauregg, found that the high fever caused by malaria could cure tertiary syphilis (in about 30% of early cases).  Many patients died, but since tertiary syphilis is terminal, scientists father day did not see an ethical problem.  Jauregg eventually won a Nobel Prize and researchers - both German (where the Nazi regime preferred human over non-human experiments) and American - used mental patients and prisoners as both research subjects and reservoirs for the malaria parasite.

When WWII broke out, malaria control because a war weapon.  Again, more soldiers developed malaria than were injured and the available drugs (made from incomplete German patents) were so toxic that soldiers refused to take them.  Coggshell, now a Naval officer, devised control methods (screens, repellant, long pants and sleeves, clearing and poisoning stagnant water) executed by enlisted men chosen for their scientific backgrounds.  Once control methods were established (if not always followed), Cogwheel turned to testing treatments on soldiers sent home to recover.

US researchers, notably Alf Alving, continued to experiment on prisoners as well, They were better treated than other prisoners, and gave consent, but such consent can't be considered informed or voluntary.  Perhaps that's why the first Nazi doctor to stand trial, Claus Schilling, was executed while later doctors were condemned to life imprisonment during the Nuremberg Trials.  Alving's work, along with Coggshell's, did lead to effective treatments, but at what cost?  Although they passed muster in the day, we cannot argue that they were ethical.  But can we refuse the life-saving advances he made?

In the end, it may not matter.  Malaria is smarter than we are, and no matter how toxic, the drugs eventually become useless against resistant strains.  Multi-drug therapy helps stave that off, but only temporarily  Our best bet is to stop transmission, which can only come with economic development, which is hindered by endemic malaria.

Present at the Future: From Evolution to Nanotechnology, Candid and Controversial Conversations on Science and Nature

Present at the Future is an imperfect commute book.  Ira Flatow, whose work I've enjoyed since I was a kid watching Newton's Apple, seems to have aimed a bit too low and a bit too trendy with this mid-2000s book.  The chapters, discussing topics ranging from the Dover, PA lawsuit on the teaching of intelligent design (disclosure - I know Steve Harvey, the attorney who argued science's side) to alternative energy sources to outer space, just aren't deep enough to be fully engaging.  On top of that, I read it with a decade of perspective, and therefore a bit of knowledge about how some of these issues turned out.

The Violinist's Thumb

Paganini, regarded as the world's greatest violinist, had freakishly flexible fingers.  Due to a genetic quirk, he could stretch and bend his thumbs and fingers into remarkable positions with ease whereas the rest of us who play (or attempt to play) the violin have to stretch and twist and pull our fingers, often to the point of discomfit and rarely with such easy dexterity.  What blessed his music career cursed the rest of his life.  Paganini's flexibility was probably due to Ehlors-Danos syndrome, a hereditary disease affecting the amount of collagen people can produce.  His tendons broke down and his lungs and colon stopped functioning properly, leaving him in pain and leading to his early death.

Sam Kean uses Paganini's story to title his follow-up to The Disappearing Spoon, but it's an aside in the story of genetics.  Kean traces the science from the first knowledge that parents pass on traits, through Mendel's pea plants (and the administrative and political headaches that interfered with his work), past horrifying experiments in cross-breeding primates, and to the success of the Human Genome Project.  Along the way, he outlines the conflict between genetics and Darwin and spends a few chapters with fruit fly scientists.  I particularly enjoyed that part, because the scientist, instead of giving their genes dry alphanumeric names, decided to be descriptive, giving us Tudor (leaving males childless), Lost in Space, and Cheap Date (for those of us with low alcohol tolerance).  Like his prior book, The Violinist's Thumb is accessible without being condescending and slips in the right amount of humor.

Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases

I've read two of Paul Offit's other books and mostly enjoyed his mix of righteous indignation and scientific explanation.  Vaccinated could have used a better editor.  Part history of vaccine production, part "as told to" memoir of Dr. Maurice Hilleman who developed or co-developed nine vaccines, and with a few chapters of public health warning tacked on, Offit's book never fully comes together.  I think the problem is that he's telling two stories linearly, one the life of an important but paradoxically ordinary man, the other of the diseases Hilleman's work prevents.  It's a bit jarring to move from the small, generally ordinary, glimpses into the life of a man who appeared to be fairly ordinary if driven to the history of a now-vanquished communicable disease and its horrifying consequences, to the discovery and development of a vaccine, and back to Hilleman's personal life.  Definitely worth reading, Vaccinated requires the reader to mentally shift gears each chapter and would have been a better book either without the Hilleman biography or with that thread in its own section.

Scientific Discovery from the Brilliant to the Bizarre

You can't go wrong with an Ig Nobel Laureate.  Chemist Len Fisher achieved immortality with his study of how to properly dunk a biscuit in a cuppa, and in Scientific Discovery from the Brilliant to the Bizarre, he takes on several well-considered - but ultimately wrong - scientific discoveries.  His first example, the soul-weighing Dr. Duncan MacDougall, appeared in Mary Roach's Spook.   Fisher uses MacDougall's experiments to demonstrate the scientific method, and how you can do everything right but still be wrong.  He follows that thread through Benjamin Franklin's lightning rod (helpful, but the best shape isn't the pointy rod Franklin created but one with a ball on the top), alchemy, and why pre-microscope ideas of reproduction made sense at the time.  It's the perfect commute book - amusing, intelligent, and easily read in snatched moments.

God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science

James Hannam starts God's Philosophers by criticizing a list of historians, including James Burke who's one of my favorites.  I'll forgive Hannam, though, because his book is so interesting and his premise so strong.  We've been taught that the Medieval period was the Dark Ages, a time when scientific discovery stopped dead and people fell back on superstition.  Obviously, that wasn't true, and Hannam shows how the discoveries of the Sixth through Fourteenth Centuries laid the groundwork for the scientific breakthroughs of the Renaissance.  More importantly, he breaks the myth of the dogmatic, unreasoning, anti-science Church of the Medieval era.  Members of religious orders were almost the only people who were literate or had any sort of education, and instead of relying to bling reputation of legends, they engaged in scientific experiments and rational thought.  If not for the monks of the so-called Dark Ages, there would be no scientific revolution.

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

Contrary to what alarmist clickbait articles say, our species had coexisted with cancer since our emergence.  At its roots, cancer is a copying error, and the older we get, the more likely we are to accumulate enough errors to knock out the safeguards against our cells' uncontrolled growth.  It's such a terrifying disease, eating the patient from within and leaving strange growths, that doctors would hide the diagnosis from their patients.  We've declared war on cancer and have to wonder whether cancer has won.

Siddhartha Murkerjee alternates between telling the overall history of cancer with a chronicle of his fellowship year at Dana Farber Cancer Institute.  The first great leaps in treatment didn't come from a doctor who focused on patient care but from Sidney Farber, a pathologist who with the help of antifolates formulated by chemist Yella Subbarow, managed to induce brief remissions in his young leukemia patients.  He'd only postponed the inevitable by a few months, but from there doctors moved onto drug combos and eventually to modern chemotherapy.  That, in turn, led to battles between the surgeons and chemotherapists, neither believing the other was in the right and both more concerned at times with killing the disease than saving the patient.  In the aftermath of AIDS activism, patients stood up and fought for more responsive care - less disfiguring surgeries, drug dosages correlated to cure the disease and spare healthy cells, and palliative treatments.

Murkerjee doesn't neglect prevention.  The first recognized environmental cancer was scrotal cancer in chimney sweeps.  Naked young boys were sent into the tight shafts and many developed a cancer almost unheard of in the general population.  Strangely, that explains why the link between smoking and lung cancer didn't jump out at researchers in the 1950s - smoking was so common that it threw off the signal-to-noise ratio.  Researchers linked chronic inflammation to some cancers, leading to a fall in liver cancer with the advent of hepatitis vaccines and in stomach cancer with better sanitation and the antibiotic treatment of ulcers.  I remember as a child hearing about the search for cancer vaccines, and while that hasn't panned out, less than a decade of vaccination against HPV is already causing a decline in the incidence of cervical cancer.  There's also secondary prevention, like mammograms and colonoscopies which find cancers early when they're more treatable.  With the identification of oncogenes, researchers are developing treatments which can turn off those genes, stopping tumor growth without harming surrounding tissues.

Periodically, Murkerjee brings us back to 2004 and the cancer wards at Dana Farber.  We see patients struggle through treatment.  Some survive and some don't, and occasionally the patient comforts the doctor who has to say, "There are no more options."  He opens and closes the book with one patient, 30-year-old kindergarten teacher Carla Reed.  Her fatigue, odd bruises, headaches, and bleeding gums  were symptoms of acute leukemia, and Muurkerjee's intake notes say that she'll probably die during treatment.  Six years later, he visits her with flowers - not on a gravesite, but at her suburban house where they drink tea and discuss her treatment while her children and dogs play in the garden.  At 5 years, her remission can be considered a cure.

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

When she was a guest on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, Mary Roach listed her topics of interest as "Sex, dead bodies, and poop."  Gulp focuses on the latter, along with farts, drool, smuggling, aptonyms, questionable medical ethics, Elvis, fad diets, and the hazards of sleeping under the covers if you're married to a champion farter who loves brussels sprouts.

Grossness aside, Roach's book is, as usual, informative and entertaining.  I was particularly interested in the chapter on Alexis St. Martin and William Beaumont.  I first encountered the story of a trapper with a hole in his stomach and the doctor who gave 19th Century medicine its first scientific view of digestion in high school biology.  My textbook portrayed Beaumont as a noble scientist who saved St. Martin against all odds.  The reality is messier (as, undoubtedly, were some of the experiments).  Beaumont exploited St. Martin, a trapper from the lowest rung of the social ladder, possibly creating the  gastric window which made Beaumont famous and discussing the man he treated with what at best could be considered condescension.  Sure, St. Martin lived with Beaumont off-and-on for years, but with few skills and a hole in his side, what choice did he have?  

Another fascinating chapter focuses on rectal smuggling.   Roach interviewed a murderer who calmly, pleasantly, described how prisoners conceal weapons, cell phones, cigarettes, and drugs in the place safest from strip searches.  Budget cuts mean that the prison staff are using 1990s computers, but the inmates are watching Netflix on smuggled smart phones, and it's because some prisoners are wiling to (hmm, how to say this gently…) mechanically reverse peristalsis from the terminus and then hold for a few hours.

Roach also encounters an Italian saliva specialist (who's horrified by the culinary traditions of the Netherlands where her lab is located), Elvis's doctor (who suggests that the King had a neural defect which led to a megacolon and ultimately his untimely and embarrassing death), the inventors of Beano and (through documents), some of the more colorful 19th Century dietary "experts."  As usual, she treats everyone with respect while still including enough humor to make the book risky to read in the quiet car.  It's the footnotes that made me giggle the hardest - about a third of them are purely informational, but the rest veer off into wonderful and hilarious observations on and off this not-usually-for-public-consumption topic.

Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History

Sometimes an author makes an interesting subject too dry to enjoy.  That's how I feel about Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History.  The subject fascinates me - many of the medieval scientific advances happened in the Islamic world - but the Ahmad Dallal's style never engrossed me.  The book, based on a seminar Dallal gave, is a bit too meta for my taste (not so much about Islamic scientific advances but about the culture's reaction to those advances) and I would have preferred more discussion of medical discoveries.

Sun in a Bottle

Imagine, unlimited power where the only by-product is helium, a non-toxic gas used both industrially and to blow up party balloons.  Sun in a Bottle traces the 20th Century quest for viable, and then commercially viable fusion power.  Building on the (ultimately wrong) Too Cheap to Meter dreams of early fission power and the sensible desire not to create waste products that could bring about the end of the world, scientists on both sides of the Cold War raced to create fusion reactors which produced more energy than they used.  Charles Seife has written a fascinating, if somewhat dry,  narrative of what is still an unsuccessful enterprise.

This Is Improbable Too!

Science can look silly - or even be silly.  Politicians love highlighting shrimp on treadmills and other apparently pointless scientific studies.  What they don't realize is that experiments that appear pointless on their face can be (and often are) applied to wider, more practical problems.  Marc Abrahams, editor of The Annals of Improbable Research and the creator of the IgNobel prizes looks at the issue from the other angle.  He looks for the odd or humorous side of legitimate scientific research (and he appreciates those who investigate questions no one asked).  Like its predecessor, This Is Improbable Too! makes a wonderful commute book.  Entertaining enough to grab your attention but structured so that it can easily be read in short blocks, it's like the IgNobel prizes.  It makes you laugh, then makes you think.

The Hidden Brain

We function on autopilot.  Our brains have to take in and analyze so much that if we we had to think about everything, we'd be paralyzed.  Imagine having to think about how to walk, how to drive a car, how to act in a social situation.  In those situations, the Hidden Brain takes over, and the effects are much more consequential than we think.

Shankar Vedantam uses a series of news stories and individual narratives to illustrate studies showing how autopilot affects us on both a small and large scale.  It affects our choice of partner (and how we see ourselves in that relationship), whether we'll survive a disaster, the accuracy of a witness's identification of an alleged criminal, how access to guns increases the chance of suicide, and who we'll vote for in a presidential election.  He also explains how our hidden brains, programmed to stick to the average/normal situation, both cause discrimination and make it harder to stamp out.  That helps explain why what I thought of a critical mass of women studying computer science when I was an engineering undergrad in the late 80s/early 90s turned out to be a peak - pop culture showed almost exclusively male geeks, so 13-year-old girls in 1992 who wanted to become engineers received more, not fewer, raised eyebrows than I did in 1982, and why I Look Like an Engineer is important.

An Entertainment for Angels: Electricity in the Enligtenment

An Entertainment for Angels is another one of my "looks interesting" purchases from Daedalus Books.  Better than some of those purchase, but not as good as most, it's a brief history of 18th Century electrical exploration.   While interesting and amusing, it included little that I didn't already know and was a bit simplistically written for my tastes.  It's not a bad book, but probably more suited to the tween with an interest in science who's moving away from YA and into adult literature.