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Title: The Best American Science Writing 2001 by Timothy Ferris, Jesse Cohen ISBN: 0-06-093648-7 Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: 16 October, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.67 (6 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Read with pleasure.
Comment: This is the first book of this series that I stumbled upon and read in almost all of its entirety. As I understand, every year a prominent guest-writer who is well versed in science is invited to hand-pick articles from various publications such as Discover, Harper's Magazine, The New Yorker, New York Times, Scientific American, and others that are ultimately incorporated in this annual publication. There is also a series editor, as some may have noticed, that does some editing as well.
The articles that are featured in this book are original, lucid, entertaining, and often shocking at the same time. The first 2/3rds of the book I found to be especially interesting and essential for knowledge and 'practical survival'. The Genome Warrior, DNA on Trial, Let Them Eat Fat, The He Hormone, and Death of an Altruist are the most memorable to me. Want to know the story behind Craig Venter's quest to the sequencing of human genome? Ever wondered about the kind of injustices that take place in prosecutions and how DNA testing comes to the rescue? Wanted to know how the testosterone hormone affects one's behavior? What about South African struggle with AIDS epidemic and pseudoscience that somehow seeped into its policies that deal with administering drugs to HIV-infected patients? Would like to know the purpose of an evolutionary adaptation of being in close proximity to humans and other organisms? If you answered to some of these questions with a resounding 'yes' then you may want to indulge your brain to knowing.
Some of the articles are political. However, science always wins!
I want to suggest to those who are very frugal to try to obtain aforementioned and the rest of the articles online. Amazon allows you to read the contents page. Although, it may sound unethically to some.
Rating: 5
Summary: Polio, testosterone, and the French Disease
Comment: Even though astronomer Timothy Ferris edited this collection of 2001 science articles, the emphasis is on biological rather than physical sciences. Some of the essays describe the way science is done, and the ways that ignorance or politics can interfere with its results.
I wish this book could have chronicled the progressive triumph of science over superstition and bureaucratic weirdness. Instead, Helen Epstein's, "The Mystery of AIDS in South Africa" shows what happens when a government backs an unproven theory on the cause of HIV infection. Another essay by Robert L. Park offers a scientific (or at least, sane) solution to a fantasy beloved of Americans: "Welcome to Planet Earth" tells the true story of what happened at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 (there actually was a secret government project).
A couple of essays struck me as inspired silliness. Stephen Jay Gould's "Syphilis and the Shepherd of Atlantis" illuminates Fracastoro's Virgilian ode to "Syphilis sive morbus Gallicus," also known as the Spanish Disease, English Disease, Neapolitan Disease, and 'Treponema pallidum.' Andrew Sullivan's "The He Hormone" was not written to be silly--the author was taking testosterone to combat the fatigue of an HIV infection--but it did very much remind me of the crowing scene in "Peter Pan."
In "Running Dry," Jacques Leslie chronicles the unassailable fact that we are running out of fresh water. Although this essay was written in 2000, it seems particularly relevant to this summer of ferocious drought and wildfire. The author develops a somber case against our current dam-building and irrigation processes.
However, "Running Dry" wasn't the book's most shocking essay--at least for me, since I was already aware of the fresh water crisis. The shocker was "The Virus and the Vaccine" by Debbie Bookchin and Jim Schumacher. Anyone who is over the age of forty might want to read this article, which was originally published in "The Atlantic Monthly." Here is why it is so interesting:
"A breakthrough in the war against polio had come in the early 1950s, when Jonas Salk took advantage of a new discovery: monkey kidneys could be used to culture the abundant quantities of polio virus necessary to mass-produce a vaccine. In 1960 Bernice Eddy, a government researcher, discovered that when she injected hamsters with the kidney mixture on which the vaccine was cultured, they developed tumors...The cancer-causing virus was soon isolated by other scientists and dubbed SV40..."
(Incidentally, Bernice Eddy's superiors tried to suppress her discovery. She was eventually demoted and lost her laboratory. But by 1963, laboratories stopped using monkey kidneys to produce polio vaccine.)
The SV40 virus was presumed harmless to humans, and no further investigations were done until 1993 when Michele Carbone, an Italian pathologist, decided to research the origins of mesothelioma, a rare and deadly cancer of the mesothelial cells in the lining of the chest and lung.
Asbestos exposure was linked to mesothelioma, which takes twenty to forty years to develop-- but Dr. Carbone also wondered if the cancer might also be caused by SV40.
Read "The Virus and the Vaccine" to learn the results of Dr. Carbone's research--especially if you were vaccinated for polio between 1955 and 1963. In fact, read all of the articles in this collection. They were written to hold the attention of lay readers like me, and most of them chronicle darn interesting science.
Rating: 4
Summary: An interesting, diverse, and readable collection
Comment: This is the first of these collections that I have read, and it is very good. The articles are chosen from a wide spectrum of publications from the year 2000, including Scientific American, National Geographic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, etc., which means most of the essays were written in 1999 or thereabouts. There is a minor concentration on the exciting developments in genetics and microbiology, including "The Recycled Generation" by Stephen S. Hall, which is about stem-cell research; "The Genome Warrior" by Richard Preston, which is about Craig Ventor and the human genome project; "DNA on Trial" by Peter J. Boyer, focusing on lawyers Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld's Innocence Project; and a couple of articles on AIDS, "The Mystery of AIDS in South Africa" by Helen Epstein and "The Virus and the Vaccine" by Debbie Bookchin and Jim Schumacher.
My favorite piece was "The Small Planets" by Erik Asphaug where I learned a little about the surprising physics of asteroids, in particular that they are most likely composed of rubble held lightly together by low gravity instead of being solid objects. When they collide, the "rubble piles" are disturbed, but within a few hours most of the pieces come back together again if the collision was not too violent. I also particularly liked John Terborgh's piece "In the Company of Humans" in which he demonstrates that animals can be attracted to humans for reasons as diverse as safety in numbers (like different species of birds foraging together) or being fascinated by a lemon-scented detergent used by a primatologist. He relates the story of a sick peccary that hung out near humans until it got well, that way avoiding hungry jaguars. Also fascinating was Greg Critser's "Let Them Eat Fat" which is about how the fast food industry is "super-sizing" us into obesity. (By the way, I tried for the first time a few months ago a Krispy Kreme donut, just to see what all the fuss was about. It was a warm puppy of an "empty-calorie" confection, pure white flour, made almost as light as air, smothered in fat and glazed with pure white sugar. It practically melted in my mouth. I can see how a steady diet of these babies could lead to a nutritional nightmare.)
Also good were Andrew Sullivan's "The He Hormone" about the phenomenon of testosterone, and Jacques Leslie"s "Running Dry" which is about the mixed blessing (and ultimate failure) of damming rivers, and the present and future crisis in the supply of fresh water.
There is a sprinkling of rather ordinary pieces by scientific heavyweights, John Archibald Wheeler, Ernst Mayr, Stephen Jay Gould, and Freeman J. Dyson, which are collected here perhaps as much for the prestige they lend to this volume as for the value of the essays. But you be the judge.
The interesting articles by Joel Achenbach and Robert L. Park, "Life Beyond Earth" and "Welcome to Planet Earth," respectively, serve well as introductions to their recently published books, Captured by Aliens: The Search for Life and Truth in a Very Large Universe (1999), and Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud (2000), again, respectively.
Bottom line: this eminently accessible collection is well worth the candle.
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Title: The Best American Science Writing 2002 by Matt Ridley, Alan Lightman ISBN: 0060936509 Publisher: Ecco Pub. Date: 03 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Best American Science Writing 2000 by James Gleick ISBN: 0060957360 Publisher: Ecco Pub. Date: 05 September, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Best American Science Writing 2003 by Oliver Sacks ISBN: 0060936517 Publisher: Ecco Pub. Date: 02 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2002 (The Best American (TM)) by Natalie Angier, Tim Folger ISBN: 0618134786 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 15 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Best American Science & Nature Writing 2001 by Burkhard Bilger, Edward O. Wilson, Edward O Wilson ISBN: 0618153594 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 10 October, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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