Science by Candlelight

Posted on May 24, 2012 by admin

The Chemical History of a Candle, by Michael Faraday, (Griffin, Bohn And Co., London, 1861), available free from Project Gutenberg in multiple e-reader formats and also from LibriVox as a free audiobook.

reviewed by Deborah Blum

"There is no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle."

It was the above line that first caught my attention. The recognition that we often best appreciate our extraordinary natural world by seeing it through the lens of the ordinary: crystalline structure as revealed by the stitchery of winter frost, the chemical dance of light and life found in the changing colors of leaves, the hot whisper of oxygen as it sends the flame higher.

That recognition has driven much of my own science writing – the idea that we can often illuminate science through tales of the everyday. I wish I could tell you that I'd thought of it first, that it was somehow primordially my own. But, at best, I think I can claim to be carrying on a time-honored tradition. Because it's very clear that the 19th century scientist Michael Faraday was doing that and doing it exceptionally well some 150 years ago.

Here at Download the Universe, we reviewers are mostly looking toward the future – what we hope is the promise of e-books, their potential to transform the reading experience. Possibly transcend it. But I want to take this opportunity to explore another aspect of the electronic publishing world, the ability to explore our past, the free archives offered by publishers like Project Gutenberg.

Founded in 1971 by the late Michael Hart, Project Gutenberg began as a labor of love, the painstaking transfer of books in the public domain – many of them once forgotten– into digital life. The Gutenberg website now makes 39,000 free e-books available. It also links with digital partners to provide access to another 60,000 e-manuscripts. Like Faraday's candle–to stretch that analogy a little here - it offers an open door, a brightly lit access to the words, and even the wisdom, of our past. Like no other generation, we can explore this virtual library, stumble across old chemical histories of candles and learn to think differently about our own work.

And stumble is exactly what I did.

I see you are not tired of the candle yet, or I am sure you would not be interested in the subject in the way you are.

Not that it was much of a fall. More of a sidestep. I spend a lot of my time writing about and researching the history of science, for books like The Poisoner's Handbook, my recent story of poison, murder and the invention of forensics in the early 20th century. I do so because I believe–no, really, I know–that we cannot understand who we are unless we understand how we got here. And so I was doing some research into the history of chemistry and Faraday's book almost immediately appeared in my browser.

This, I think, is the other magic wrought by on-line publishers like Project Gutenberg. You can be happily rambling through the history of chemistry (a phrase, I know, that only a geek could write) and suddenly discover that a scientist born in the close of the 18th century (1790) understood perfectly the very principles of science communication that you'd been preaching in the 21st century.

Continue reading “Science by Candlelight” →

How a locked-in woman took control of a robot arm

Posted on May 16, 2012 by admin

The Electric Mind written by Jessica Benko. The Atavist, 2012. Kindle Singles, The Atavist app , iBooks, and other outlets via The Atavist website.

Reviewed by Ed Yong

Throughout the history of neuroscience, we have gained an inordinate amount of knowledge by studying people with severe brain damage, and watching how they manage to live. HM’s surgically altered brain revealed secrets about how memories are formed – after his death, he was revealed to be an American man called Henry Molaison. KC, a Canadian man whose real name is still unknown, also taught us much about how memory works, following brain damage sustained during a motorcycle accident. SM, a woman with an inherited brain disease, reportedly feels no fear.

These patients are known by abbreviations that preserve their anonymity, but also shroud their contributions. Their hopes, struggles and lives are condensed into patterns of injury and aberrant behaviours, and distilled into pairs of letters. But sometimes, very rarely, we get a privileged opportunity – a chance to unpack the people behind the letters, and to learn not just how they became a part of science, but how science became a part of them.

Jessica Benko’s new story, The Electric Mind, provides just such an insight. It is the latest in an increasingly strong portfolio of stories from The Atavist, a digital publisher that produces stories “longer than typical magazine articles but shorter than books”.

The Electric Mind is the story of Cathy Hutchinson, a woman known in the scientific literature as S3. She’s a mother-of-two who was “always goofing around and singing and dancing”, until a stroke disconnected her brain from her spinal column and left her with an active mind imprisoned in a frozen frame.

For several years, Cathy has been taking part in a groundbreaking experiment called BrainGate – not a sordid cerebral scandal, but a bold project that aims to give paralysed people control over mechanical limbs. The scientists behind the project fitted Cathy with microscopic electrodes that read the neural buzz within her motor cortex – the area of her brain that controls movements. The implant acts like an electronic spine that links Cathy’s brain to a computer or robot, bypassing her own immobilised flesh.

At first, she used the electrodes to control the movements of an on-screen cursor. More recently, she commandeered a robotic arm. As she thought about grabbing a bottle, the electrodes deciphered her mental commands and the arm carried them out. “For the first time in 14 years—indeed, for the first time for any quadriplegic—Cathy was able to reach out into the world.”

The project’s crowning results are published today in the journal Nature, concurrently with the launch of Benko’s story. The paper itself preserves Cathy’s anonymity, and describes her in the starkest of terms. She’s “a 58-year-old woman with tetraplegia caused by brainstem stroke… She is unable to speak (anarthria) and has no functional use of her limbs. She has occasional bilateral or asymmetric flexor spasm movements of the arms that are intermittently initiated by any imagined or actual attempt to move. S3’s sensory pathways remain intact.”

The reality behind these cold, precise words comes through in Benko’s skilful narration. Right from the start, she plunges us into Cathy’s world, as she wakes from a coma to hear the sound of the ventilator beside her bed.

We get to know Cathy through Benko’s eyes, as she tracks down the woman via her son, and meets her for the first time. First-person accounts can break the fourth wall to a distracting extent, and many journalists would balk at inserting themselves so prominently into a story. But Benko earns her place as a protagonist in her own tale, in a way that reminds me of Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The author’s quest becomes an inextricable part of the story itself. Through Benko’s expectations of meeting Cathy, her descriptions of their first meetings, and her difficulties in interviewing a woman who can only communicate via eye-flickers, we learn the extent of Cathy’s disability, and the frustrating complexity of seemingly simple tasks.

Writing about extreme disability (and attempts to overcome it) is not easy. You’re always an adjective away from being mawkish, and an adverb away from being ghoulish. Benko deftly negotiates the tightrope. She cleverly uses essays from other locked-in patients to describe hardships that would sound overwritten from her own hand. And she’s a master of keenly observed but simply delivered prose. When Cathy laughs, for example, it’s “a short burst of air that vibrated across vocal cords she can’t voluntarily control.” No embellishments required. These scenes throw their own punches. Benko just puts you in the ring.

Benko’s eye for detail also elevates her descriptions of experiments that have been reported again and again in the press. We see what Cathy’s nursing home room is like. We learn that the electrodes were fired onto her brain with “a pneumatic device like a tiny air hammer”. We discover that the bottle that Cathy lifted via robot was a thermos full of coffee (she loves coffee), “emblazoned with the initials and insignias of the research team and sponsors”. She finds drama in minutiae. While other reporters rush straight for a snare-drum crash of incredible implications, Benko takes her time with scenes that build to a steady crescendo.

Using Cathy’s story as an anchor, The Electric Mind stretches back in time to look at the historical events that preceded BrainGate (including a horse accident and suspected psychic powers). The story also pulls outwards at other means of reaching the same ends, such as functional electrical stimulation, where electrodes stimulate a patient’s own muscles instead of a robotic limb.

These sections, where we leave Cathy and focus on the field at large, are arguably the weakest elements of the story. Around the two-thirds mark, the tale threatens to veer off course. From rich details about a woman steering a robot arm with difficulty, we’re suddenly plunged into hand-waving speculation about infrared vision, Avatar-like… well…. avatars, and telepathic soldiers (and the irony of reading a journalist’s words about electronic telepathy on a handheld device was not lost on me).

But then, in a rather daring move, it becomes clear that this was exactly the point (keep an eye out for the start of Chapter Seven). All the other characters not involved in BrainGate, from Nicolelis to a ridiculously breathless DARPA spokesperson, serve as foils for Cathy. Their visions are too far removed from the reality of her condition. They remind us about what The Electric Mind could easily have been – a story of technological triumph and glorious futurism. Instead, Benko has treated us to something far better – a story of extreme limitations and what happens when people (and science) run up against them.

*****

Ed Yong is a British science writer who writes the award-winning blog Not Exactly Rocket Science. His work has appeared in Nature, New Scientist, the BBC, the Guardian, the Times, Wired UK, Discover, CNN, Slate, the Daily Telegraph, the Economist and more. He lives in London with his wife. He has never been impregnated by a botfly but he does rather like ants.

Artificial Epidemics: You’re Not Really Sick, You’re Overdiagnosed

Posted on April 20, 2012 by Carl Zimmer

Artificial Epidemics: How Medical Activism Has Inflated the Diagnosis of Prostate Cancer and Depression, by Stewart Justman. Now and then Reader, 2012. Publisher's site, Kindle, iBooks, Kobo

Reviewed by SciCurious, guest reviewer

"In the mid-1990s I found myself on a committee charged with reviewing medical expenditures under my university's health plan. Like the rest of the country, the members of the plan had fallen in love with anti-depressants, which accounted for our largest single drug expense-several hundred thousand dollars annually, as I recall. When someone around the table commented that this was a lot of money to be laying out for mood-altering pills, a defender countered, "If they prevent one suicide, they're worth it!" Argument ceased. No one in the room, including myself, was aware that anti-depressants actually increase the risk of suicide, particularly in patients up to twenty-four years of age."

This opening scene from Stewart Justman's Artificial Epidemics sets the stage for a tangled, convoluted tale of two distinct diagnoses–prostate cancer and Major Depressive Disorder–and how intensive screening for these diseases has rendered us all overdiagnosed. Justman, a professor of Liberal Studies at the University of Montana, has made a long study of cancer, publishing several books including Do No Harm: How a Magic Bullet for Prostate Cancer Became a Medical Quandary and Seeds of Mortality: The Public and Private Worlds of Cancer. Artificial Epidemics, a slim, 22-page eBook appears to be an attempt to bring together his previous writing on cancer with another highly-diagnosed and talked about disease: Major Depressive Disorder.

"The campaign against depression and the campaign against prostate cancer both used inflamed arguments and appealed to fixed ideas," Justman writes. He lays the bulk of the blame for the resulting "artificial epidemic" on medical activists, who have taking screening for these diseases to large segments of the population. Justman also argues the screenings for prostate cancer and depression suffer from an “absence of appropriately discerning methods,” and thus help in the push toward the overdiagnosis of the American population.

His solution? Stop the screening, stop the treatment. We are not sick, we are overdiagnosed.

Justman’s concerns regarding prostate cancer are not particularly new. Prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing has been controversial since the beginning. As Justman notes, “the same vial of blood divided in two may give different PSA readings.” Medical experts have also voiced criticism about the cut-off points for diagnosis for prostate cancer. Since the treatment for prostate cancer can be invasive, the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force has proposed that when men score an initial PSA that only barely reaches the threshold for cancer, they should not immediately start treatment. Instead, they should undergo so-called "watchful waiting."

Justman sees the same problems with oversensitive analyses and overdiagnosis in Major Depressive Disorder. But his argument also goes beyond against current screening practices. He's against the diagnosis of depression itself.

"The possibility that much 'depression' might not be a disorder at all has been drowned out by medical activism,” Justman writes. He scoffs at the World Health Organization's prediction that depression is soon to become the second leading cause of disability across the globe as “hubristic.” He argues that it's far too easy to diagnose, given that the symtoms include things like feeling tired, overeating, or not finding pleasure in things. "According to this checklist, I would qualify for a diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder if I simply had too little energy and had trouble staying asleep–as in fact I do…In point of fact, my symptoms are not diagnostic of anything."

What is Justman’s response to these two ‘artificial epidemics’ of prostate cancer and depression? Sit down, relax. "Much of what is called cancer is not destined to cause death-and so too, much of what is considered depression resolves itself without medical intervention." He wants the screenings to stop, and overdiagnosis to end. Justman proposes an appeal to prudence. "Prudence deems life without sadness a utopian fantasy, silent cancer a tolerable reality, and the medicalization of the human condition an aggressive expansion of professional authority."

Unfortunately, while Justman’s statements about prostate cancer diagnoses are well researched, his mockery of Major Depressive Disorder is both insulting and ill-conceived. What's more, his arguments for both prostate cancer and depression are made in complete incoherence. The narrative jumps from prostate cancer to depression in the same paragraph. Here he even makes the leap within the same sentence: "Setting a two-month period for allowable grief is like setting the threshold for an abnormal PSA at a figure that trades off a reduction of false negatives with an inflow of false positives."

Justman composes long, run-on sentences in an effort to show how prostate cancer and Major Depressive Disorder diagnoses are similar: "Both PSA testing, which appeals to evidence presumed to exist, and testing for depression, which appeals to diagnostic criteria conceded by the psychiatrist in charge of the composition of the third edition of the DSM to be seriously defective, reveal conflicted attitudes toward evidence-based medicine itself." The net result is an exhaustive and repetitive reading experience. In the end, I’m just confused and beginning to think my prostate has been experiencing depressed mood.

In this tangle of prostate cancer and depression, the focus of the title is lost. I have yet to read how, exactly, medical activism has influenced clinicians and insurance companies to collude with them in the overdiagnosis of the nation. Instead, the book impresses the idea of overdiagnosis, without offering any clear solution except to stop diagnosing.

Here Justman confuses the ideas of diagnosis and treatment. While it makes sense to delay invasive treatments and track the progress of an already diagnosed disease, stopping screening and diagnosis would merely ignore the problems. Prostate cancer is still the second leading cause of death in men. Additionally, Justman’s flippant attitude toward Major Depressive Disorder ignores the real suffering of patients, and adds to the stigma these patients experience. But Justman clearly believes depression is not a real problem and most prostate cancers as fine.Just put on a smile, stop wallowing in your emotions. That prostate enlargement probably doesn’t mean anything.

After spending so much time reading Justman’s incoherent arguments, dismissive delivery, and his final, confusing appeal to “prudence”, my only recommendation is that if you are concerned about issues with prostate cancer or Major Depressive Disorder diagnosis and treatment, go read something else. The writing is bound to be less confusing. After suffering through 22 long pages of this ebook to write this review, I’m afraid my prostate needs an antidepressant.

Scicurious is a PhD in Physiology, and is currently a postdoc in biomedical research. She loves the brain, and so should you. She writes for The Scicurious Brain at Scientific American Blogs and Neurotic Physiology on the Scientopia Network. Follow on Twitter @Scicurious.

Have I Got A Moon Rock For You…

Posted on March 31, 2012 by admin

The Case of the Missing Moon Rocks, written and illustrated by Joe Kloc. The Atavist, 2012 (Atavist app for iPhone or iPad,/Kindle/Nook/iBook/Kobo)

The sheer noise and spray of rhetorical fæces produced by the swarms of pygmy wretches infecting the U.S. political system these days makes it hard, sometimes, to reconstruct the full metal weirdness of the state of the nation way back when. That would have been my teen years, in the ‘70s, that time when those of us who aspired to the writing life had to buy our slates and no. 2 chisels directly from actual carbon-based life forms. We did so while watching the triumph and collapse of the King Rat of crazed, feral politicians, the 37^th of his office, our own unindicted co-conspirator, Richard Milhouse Nixon. (Cue this number.)

It’s truly hard to convey just how evil, absurd, and oddly grand Nixon was to those who have only experienced the banal corruptions and miseries of the current scene, but the trademark Nixonian mix of paranoia, calculation, and genuine aspiration to statesmanship produced public theater the likes of which I do not think we’ll see again in my lifetime. Just how odd? Well, to get a taste, just a hint of the nooks and crannies of history into which even Tricky Dickie’s most trivial by-blows could lead, check out Joe Kloc’s tale of one man’s pursuit of what might be termed Nixon’s moon-struck folly.

Continue reading “Have I Got A Moon Rock For You…” →

One man and his superorganism

Posted on March 2, 2012 by admin

Before the Swarm, by Nicholas Griffin. The Atavist, 2011 (Atavist app for iPhone or iPad/ Kindle/ Nook/ iBook/ Kobo)

Reviewed by Ed Yong

When we first meet Mark Moffett, the man at the centre of Before the Swarm, he is grinning about a botfly maggot that has died in his hand. Not in the palm of his hand, mind you, but implanted within the flesh.

The rest of the tale – the third in The Atavist’s growing stable of long-form non-fiction – proceeds along similar lines.

Nicholas Griffin narrates the life of an ant-loving scientist who self-describes as “Dr Bugs”, plays at both journalism and photography, and frequently disappears on long jungle odysseys. He loves the world’s most painful insect, but he loathes universities. Standing outside of the scientific establishment, he has been criticised for favouring mass media and compelling stories over testing hypotheses and collecting data. There is a compelling counterpoint, which Griffin notes early on, between the ants, whose societies revolve around “hierarchy and specialisation” and Moffett, who “can’t seem to stand either one”.

Griffin’s writing is wonderfully lean and evocative. When Moffett speaks, it is with tight snippets of dialogue (he introduces his parasite with “Have you met my botfly?” and greets the legendary E. O. Wilson with “Hi Ed”). When he is described, it is with tight, unadorned prose.

Then again, one gets the sense that Moffett doesn’t require much embellishment. He’s a writer’s dream protagonist: quotable, possessed of a rebellious streak, and prone to misadventure. He electrocutes himself! He gets kidnapped! He’s been bitten! There is a real risk here that the tale could descends into a list of amusing anecdotes – less a cohesive story, and more The Continuing and Wacky Adventures of Mark Moffett.

But just when Before the Swarm starts to veer down that direction, Griffin hits you with genuine tragedy at the midpoint. I’ll stop short of explicit spoilers but it involves the quote, “That’s a fucking krait.” It’s a turning point, and Griffin deals with it well, giving it room to breathe and ramify. It changes the feel of the earlier lists of derring-do from a Boy’s Own adventure into a tally of genuinely dangerous pursuits.

Then, in the second half, after much time with the man’s history and exploits, his ideas finally get a chance to shine. Sadly, they merely flicker. Here, arguably where it matters most, Moffett becomes a bit-player in his own story.

We learn that, riffing off E.O. Wilson, Moffett thinks that human and ant societies both follow similar rules, and develop similar features, as they get bigger. And we’re told that this is a “fresh idea” even though it feels somewhat familiar.

We’re told that Moffett advocates the idea of ant colonies as superorganisms – that is, they behave like a single being. The superlatively successful Argentine ants are the prime example: its colonies contain billions or even trillions of individuals, genetically similar and spread across entire states. But while Griffin writes about the theory’s origins a century ago, and we meet another scientist who has “written nearly 50 papers on the subject”, Moffett’s own contribution remains quite vague. Griffin says that he is “looking to move beyond simple metaphors” but then relies heavily on metaphors that liken ants to white blood cells and urban humans. The very idea of a superorganism is itself a metaphor.

The scientifically minded reader is then left with many questions. What does it actually say about ants to treat a colony as a single organism? What insights or testable predictions come of it? How has our hero actually advanced the science of superorganisms? None of these is clear. He is probably embroiled in a meaty intellectual debate, but it never truly surfaces. A fellow scientist criticises the idea of an Argentine ant supercolony for untold reasons, and Moffett is later seen attempting to dismantle the critique on untold grounds. In lieu of details, we’re left with the idea of a superorganism as nothing more than a neat framing device, rather than the dogma-shaking “controversial theory” that the standfirst promises.

We might have expected it. The first third of the story, after all, is devoted to telling us how Moffett has a predilection for evocative ideas over solid hypotheses. It’s still a sting in an otherwise great story, but ultimately it’s not a deal-breaker. While Before the Swarm fails as the story of a brave new idea, it amply succeeds as a profile of a fascinating man.

And it ends with a video of a maggot erupting from the skin of its protagonist. That helps too.

*****