I wrote an article for this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine about the grey zone between coma and consciousness. Stories like this one are always hard, because there are so many crucial dimensions to the subject and so little room to do justice to them all. For example, I couldn’t even begin to explain how the research I describe in the article–using PET and MRI scans to measure the brain activity in people with traumatic brain injuries–is a beautiful reverse twist on some of the most famous research ever done on the brain: the nineteenth century doctor Pierre Paul Broca’s discovery of a region of the brain dedicated to speech.
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I write about science, and in a recent overhaul of my web site, I decided it was a good time to add a blog. I’ll be posting thoughts about new research in the fields that I can’t get enough of–the brain and the body, how they evolved, and where they’re going. I’m still getting the hang of iblog, and so the first few posts will probably be pretty clunky. And until I can figure out how to post comments, please feel free to email me. I will try to post some messages from time to time in my own posts.
The New York Times, October 14, 2001
The history of life, on the whole, has been a soggy affair. A vast majority of Earth’s creatures — from kelp to plankton to tube worms — has always lived in the ocean. It was probably in the ocean that life first began four billion years ago, and for billions of years after that emerged from the sea only around 360 million years ago; these recent air-breathing years have been a brief coda to our evolution.
The author and artist Richard Ellis has done a tremendous amount over the years to put things in proportion, to draw our eyes from the land to the sea. He has produced a series of authoritative books on marine life, ranging from sharks to whales to deep-sea ecosystems.
Science, September 14, 2001
In the 1970s, epidemiologists documented remarkably high rates of multiple sclerosis (MS) on the isolated Faeroe Islands in the North Atlantic. MS is nothing new to medicine, but it was new to the Faeroe Islands: There was no sign of it there before the 1940s. The epidemiologists found that the disease got its start during an outbreak coinciding with the arrival of British soldiers during World War II.
That an influx of visitors can trigger an outbreak is not unusual. But for it to trigger this specific disease was, because MS was generally thought to be a chronic condition brought on by genetic factors and perhaps a defective immune system.
Continue reading “Do Chronic Diseases Have an Infectious Root?”
Science, July 27, 2001
For the past 2 years, marine scientists have been engaged in a remarkable new experiment in the Red Sea. While tensions in the Middle East have escalated in the wake of renewed clashes between Israelis and Palestinians, researchers from Israel and Jordan have embarked on a long-term collaborative effort to monitor coral reefs that straddle the border between their two countries.
The Red Sea Marine Peace Park aims to protect a unique but imperiled ecosystem at the northern tip of the Gulf of Aqaba. Home to 140 species of stony corals and nearly 1000 species of fish, the gulf’s magnificent coral reefs are a marine biologist’s delight.