A review of Isaac Newton, by James Gleick
191 pages. Vintage Books, $13.95

“Newton was not the first of the age of reason,” wrote economist John Maynard Keynes. “He was the last of the magicians…[H]e looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence.”

Isaac Newton—scientist, theologian, heretic—occupies a unique space in human history. Few others have possessed insight sufficient to comprehend nature from first principles, or the flexibility to invent the tools necessary to formalize their insights. Newton was the last to live in pre-Newtonian times: this is the extent of the changes he wrought, that his very name indicates a shift in understanding. Gottfried Leibniz, scientist and one of Newton’s many nemeses, once remarked to the Queen of Prussia that “taking Mathematicks from the beginning of the world to the time of [Newton], what he had done was much the better half.”

Such a towering figure is too easily occluded by his works, and Newton the human being is frequently forgotten. James Gleick, author of Chaos and The Information, reveals in his superb biography Isaac Newton a man flawed by vanity and superstition, a man who hoarded his secrets and who harbored intense animosity for those who presumed to second-guess his genius. Perhaps most notably, Gleick reveals a Newton in isolation, alone in a scientific landscape largely determined by lesser minds. Isaac Newton was, as Gleick puts it, “born into a world of darkness, obscurity, and magic.” Full Review »

A review of A Primate’s Memoir: A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons By Robert Sapolsky.
304 pages. New York: Touchstone, 2002.

Acting nonchalant in front of a baboon is not an art many scientists have to contemplate while going about their jobs. Robert Sapolsky, neuroscientist cum primatologist and long-time professor at Stanford, is faced with that very challenge on most days that he spends in the field with his tribe of baboons in Kenya. Sapolsky took over twelve years to assemble and write the stories that makes up A Primate’s Memoir, and what results is a riveting account of the decidedly unusual setting in which Sapolsky’s science takes place. Full Review »

A review of The Beak of the Finch, by Jonathan Weiner. 332 pp. New York: Knopf, 1994.

To many of us, the idea of watching evolution sounds like watching mountain ranges rise out of the earth or witnessing a glacier wear down a landscape. How can we possibly observe such a slow-moving phenomenon? Even Charles Darwin himself was convinced of the unwatchability of evolutionary events: “We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the lapse of ages,” he wrote. And if it can’t be seen, how can evolution be measured? How can it be proven?

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Beak of the Finch, Jonathan Weiner shows us that this conception of evolution—as a slow-moving, immeasurable process—is far removed from reality. He builds his compelling narrative around one research project: the pivotal study by British biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant, who spent decades examining birds and their beaks in the Galápagos.

The Galápagos Islands are home to a genus of thirteen finch species, known today as Darwin’s finches. There are two species of cactus finch, a vegetarian finch, three species of ground finches, a woodpecker finch, a vampire finch, and others. They differ in the size and shape of their beaks, and each beak is suited to a particular food source.

Full Review »

A review of The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson. 299pp. Riverhead: New York, 2006.

A refreshing slurp of the water from London’s Broad Street pump proved fatal to over six hundred people in the hot, late summer of 1854. Death acted quickly. Victims went from healthy to dead in less than a day. Corpses piled up, as did panic and confusion.

Welcome to Victorian era London in the midst of its infamous 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak. The city was at cholera’s mercy, with little proper direction of how to cure the disease or stop its spread. The symptoms would begin with an upset stomach before quickly progressing into vomiting, muscle spasms, and abdominal pains. The victim’s pulse would fade, and their skin would turn blue and leathery. Most frightful of all, the victim would eject vast quantities of water flecked with tiny white particles via the bowel; rice-water stool, as it was called. Once that happened, the victim was likely to be dead in hours. Full Review »

A review of The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear. By Seth Mnookin. 308 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $26.99.

In a small, sleepy corner of Arizona in August 1994, a child who seemed wholly ordinary was born. Her parents named her Michelle. At sixteen months, the toddler was hit with a 106-degree fever. Soon afterwards, she began talking noticeably less. By her third birthday, hundreds of quiet days later, Michelle’s physician suspected she might have a cognitive disorder. Visits to a neurologist and a developmental psychologist confirmed this suspicion: Michelle was diagnosed with severe autism. Thinking back on her medical history, searching for signs and grasping for causes, her parents remembered the fever. Michelle had burned up shortly after the day she received her first measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. Full Review »

A review of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. By Rebecca Skloot. 384 pages. Crown, $26

Henrietta Lacks helped create the polio vaccine. She was instrumental in developing drugs to treat herpes, leukemia, influenza, and Parkinson’s disease. In an age where scientists work in increasingly narrow fields of expertise, Henrietta Lacks was not even a scientist, and in fact never even got to study science. Henrietta Lacks was an impoverished black woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951. Scientists took a sample from her tumor (without her permission) a few months prior to her death and used it to establish the first immortal human cell line, HeLa, which is used by scientists the world over.

Today, Henrietta’s cells are bought, sold, and studied by the millions. Over 60,000 scientific papers cite their use, and that number increases by roughly 300 every month. But while tiny pieces of Henrietta have traveled the world and contributed to award-winning research, her family has remained in Baltimore, living in poverty. Often, they are unable to afford health insurance or proper medical care, and though they first learned of their mother’s contributions to science in the 1970s, they were still confused as to what had happened to her cells. Full Review »

In a small, sleepy corner of Arizona in August 1994, a child who seemed wholly ordinary was born. Her parents named her Michelle. At sixteen months, the toddler was hit with a 106-degree fever. Soon afterwards, she began talking noticeably less. By her third birthday, hundreds of quiet days later, Michelle’s physician suspected she might have a cognitive disorder. Visits to a neurologist and a developmental psychologist confirmed this suspicion: Michelle was diagnosed with severe autism. Thinking back on her medical history, searching for signs and grasping for causes, her parents remembered the fever. Michelle had burned up shortly after the day she received her first measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine.

Today, one in 110 children has an autism spectrum disorder, a ten-fold increase from the 1980s. Scientists usually credit this rise to a growing awareness of autism, with more cases today being recognized and labeled as such. Autism’s causes are still not thoroughly understood, but the idea that vaccines are to blame has recently seeped into society: the MMR vaccine has been widely used in the United States since the 1970s, making its rise coincide with the autism toll.

In his fast-paced non-fiction account, Seth Mnookin confronts the debate over whether or not childhood vaccines, specifically MMR, can cause autism. He develops Michelle’s story as a main example of the misunderstanding that has resulted. Despite a growing body of reliable studies that have found no relation between the two, a quarter of American parents cling onto the idea that vaccinating their children is the wrong choice. With more families electing not to vaccinate, we are seeing the re-emergence of viruses, such as like pertussis, that had very nearly been eradicated. Full Review »

What do animals experience that humans don’t? What experiences do we share with the feathered, furred, shelled, and scaly? These questions aren’t easy ones to answer, if they are answerable at all. But in their book Bats Sing, Mice Giggle: The Surprising Science of Animals’ Inner Lives, neuropsychologist Karen Shanor and neuroethologist Jagmeet Kanwal provide a compendium of scientific research to help shed light on what the world looks, smells, sounds, and feels like to just about everyone.

While much of the research that spills out into popular media regarding animal senses and cognition involves dogs, primates, dolphins and (especially) humans, Shanor and Kanwal draw from a much more expansive pool of sensory science. Both authors have dedicated much of their own research to the study of animals’ inner lives; Shanor, a former Stanford University researcher, spent a good deal of time trying to understand how rats learn and what cats dream about. Kanwal, who teaches at Georgetown University, has done his own fair share of research, with a clear fondness for bats (which we see in personal accounts throughout several chapters). His field—neuroethology—studies the neurological relationship to nonhuman animal behavior, and his expertise lends a particularly authoritative voice to Bats Sing, Mice Giggle.

From cockroaches to primates—and just about every critter in between—the two authors construct a straightforward portrait of the complexity of experience across the Animalian spectrum. The results are sometimes surprising, even for someone who presumes to be well read on the subject. Full Review »

A review of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
320 pages
W. W. Norton & Company

What happens to us when we die? There are few activities more unsettling than the contemplation of your own mortality. Religious or not, no one relishes dwelling on the subject at length. And whatever you may think about the afterlife, the material realities of death are disconcerting to say the least. A short list of possible fates: being buried and left to rot inside a wooden box, being burned into a pile of gray ash in an industrial oven, or being taken apart bit by bit by medical students in the name of science. Regardless of the specific outcome, these are all rather disturbing destinies to consider.

Mary Roach, on the other hand, dares to tackle this taboo with raw honesty and enthusiasm. “We are biology,” she writes without equivocation. “We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.” In Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Roach explores the topic with great journalistic gusto and turns the uncomfortable subject into a quite unforgettable narrative.

Stiff is a wildly entertaining (if occasionally meandering) account of the many ways human cadavers are used, reused, and abused. Certainly not for the weak of stomach, Roach’s foray into this largely unexplored subject opens on a scene of forty disembodied human heads arranged neatly on roaster pans for a plastic surgery practice session. Drawing on extensive first-hand research, Roach then guides the reader through a menagerie of cadaveric fates, including dissection, crash-testing, forensics research, organ donation and more, while also providing captivating anecdotes from the history of anatomy. Her frank narrative style is pleasantly irreverent, yet still quite respectful, providing a tactful amount of wit and humor to a subject that might otherwise be intolerably morbid.

Full Review »

A review of Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto
209 pages. Alfred A. Knopf.

If you bought a Windows computer in the late 1990s, perhaps you remember the system’s preloaded music. Beethoven’s “Fifth Symphony,” Bach’s “Brandenburg Concerto Number Three,” Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies”—Windows Media Player included them all, along with two songs created by Microsoft called “Passport” and “Canyon,” the apparent digital love children of elevator music and 1980s advertising jingles. Though any listener could recognize the classics’ melodies, each note sounded somehow mechanical, and certainly simplified.

In his first book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, Jaron Lanier uses the birth of these songs as one example in his intriguing investigation into culture’s current relationship with technology. The songs use a programming strategy called MIDI to make music. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, which simplifies music’s complexity into discrete steps in pitch. Dave Smith, a synthesizer designer, devised MIDI in the 1980s, but we still find MIDI songs everywhere from digital alarm clocks to cell phone ringtones. Certainly, they are no longer the best available strategy, but, Lanier argues, they have become a “locked-in” design, an assumed and arbitrary rule in computer programming.

Lanier looks ahead a thousand years at a hypothetical descendant in a spaceship: “She will probably be annoyed by some awful, beepy MIDI-driven music to alert her that the antimatter filter needs to be recalibrated.” Full Review »