I Heard the Sirens Scream: Laurie Garrett Takes on 9/11 & Anthrax

Posted on March 26, 2012 by admin

I Heard the Sirens Scream: How Americans Responded to the 9/11 and Anthrax Attacks, by Laurie Garrett. 2011. Kindle

Reviewed by Maia Szalavitz

Laurie Garrett is the only reporter to win the three major prizes for journalism: the Pulitzer, the Peabody and the Polk (she won that one twice).

Her first book, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance was a New York Times bestseller. Her follow up, Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health, also brought the threat of infectious disease into sharp focus (disclosure: I am acknowledged in it for help on addiction information related to IV drug use). Her work on AIDS and Ebola (for which she won the Pulitzer) is stellar, and she is an essential writer and thinker on public health.

Her latest, I Heard the Sirens Scream: How Americans Responded to the 9/11 and Anthrax Attacks, was published as an ebook on the 10th anniversary of those events. Like her prior work, it is relentlessly and thoroughly reported, profoundly important and often compelling. Any historian of 9/11 focused on public health will have to reckon with this work.

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The Frozen Future of Nonfiction

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Carl Zimmer

Why The Net Matters: How the Internet Will Save Civilization. By David Eagleman, Canongate Books, 2010. (For iPad)

Reviewed by Seth Mnookin

Unless you landed at Download the Universe with the mistaken impression that it’s a new torrent aggregator, chances are you’re already familiar with David Eagleman, the 40-year-old Baylor College of Medicine neuroscientist/author/futurist. Perhaps you’re one of the millions of people around the world who was dazzled by Sum, Eagleman’s breathtaking, oftentimes brilliant, collection of short stories about the afterlife—or perhaps it was Incognito, Eagleman’s exploration of the unconscious, that caught your eye. (It’s not everyday, after all, that a pop-sci book pulls off the tricky balancing act of simultaneously appealing to the cognoscenti and the hoi polloi.)

Or maybe you haven’t read any of his books. Maybe you heard him on Radiolab, offering his interpretation for why time seems to slow down during moments of heightened awareness or explaining how walking can be understood as the transformation of falling into forward motion. Maybe you first encountered Eagleman in a recent profile, like the NOVA special that aired last February or the 9,000-word New Yorker piece that ran last April or the Houston Magazine spread in which Eagleman, decked out head-to-toe in Versace, was featured as one of 2011’s “Men of Style.”

If your enthusiasms tend more toward the musical realm, perhaps Eagleman first appeared on your radar when he and Brian Eno performed together st the Sydney Opera House; or, if you’re more a Black Flag than Talking Heads and U2 type of person, maybe it was the time he interviewed Henry Rollins about dreams at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City.

Or maybe you’re like me, and you can no longer remember when you first became aware of Eagleman and his work–you just know you’re curious about whatever it is he decides to tackle next because it will inevitably be interesting and erudite and thought-provoking and, in all likelihood, fun.

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Risks and Benefits of the Radium Palace

Posted on March 7, 2012 by Carl Zimmer

The Stir of Waters: Radiation, Risk, and the Radon Spa of Jáchymov. By Paul Voosen. Kindle Single

Reviewed by Ann Finkbeiner (guest reviewer)

Jáchymov is an old Czech city set in mountains under which are seams of uranium. The uranium is mined, and through the mines run hot springs — "hot" both thermally and radioactively. The hot water is piped up into baths for Jáchymov's famous radon (a gas that's a byproduct of uranium) spas. The radon spas are a century old and even now, every year, nearly 20,000 people come to them to bathe and thereby treat a variety of ills. In a normal three-week treatment, the people inhale about 3.5 millisieverts of radiation. That's about forty times the 0.08 millisieverts I received in 1979 before I got in my car and got the hell out of Harrisburg, PA, panicked after the accident at Three Mile Island.

That enormous disconnect between the risk seen by a panicky me and the benefits seen by Jáchymov's customers is what The Stir of Waters is about. My panic about the risk is partly a reflection of the Western world's attitude toward radiation, which is neurotic. The perception of benefit is partly a result of the former Soviet bloc's attitude, which is relaxed and secretive; and partly a result of the relief of the customers' chronic aches and pains, especially for arthritis and auto-immune disorders. So how to balance the risks and benefits of radiation in low doses? Right here, right where you want Science to step out front and adjudicate, Science turns pink and disappears behind the curtains.

Science does know the risks of radiation that's high-dose: experimental subject–from the survivors of Hiroshima to the uranium miners of Jáchymov–die, get sick, get cancers. But scientists can't extrapolate from high dose/lots of sickness to lower dose/less sickness. The low extrapolated numbers of cancers that people might be getting after medical X-rays or radon spas get lost in the numbers of the cancers that people get normally. Scientists can't quantify the risk.

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The Germ Theory of Cancer

Posted on February 27, 2012 by Carl Zimmer

Controlling Cancer: A Powerful Plan for Taking On the World's Most Daunting Disease, by Paul Ewald. TED Books, 2012. (Kindle/Nook/ iBookstore)

There's an inescapability about cancer. It can feel more like fate than a disease. People who smoke can't help but wonder when a cell in their lungs will go rogue and produce a tumor. Living near a toxic dump gives people the sense that someone is playing Russian Roullette with their children, and sooner or later the bullet is going to fire. If you are a woman from a family of breast cancer victims, you can almost hear the clock ticking.

But we must not forget that some cancers are less like fate than they are like the flu. Take cervical cancer. It can't be blamed on bad genes or exposure to chemicals. It's caused by a virus. The human papillomavirus thrives by infecting epithelial cells. It disables their brakes, so that the cells grow faster than normal. To avoid being discovered by the immune system, HPV cloaks host cells so that they appear normal. Most people carry harmless strains of HPV. Your eyelashes are probably coated in them. They don't make the vast majority of their hosts sick because we strike a balance with the viruses. We are constantly shucking off the top layer of epithelial cells from our skin and other surfaces. Infected cells typically don't stick around long enough to cause us trouble. But every now and then, HPV will push a cell on the path to runaway growth and, ultimately, cancer.

Paul Ewald, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Louisville, thinks that we need to let this fact sink in. Most of the research on new cancer treatments goes into searching for ways to blast tumors. This is an expensive strategy that yields relatively little benefit, Ewald argues. Chemotherapy drugs can have awful side effects, and the cancer itself can adapt to the medicine through a nefarious form of natural selection. Mutations that make cancer cells more resistant to the chemotherapy take over the tumor. But if we could stop a significant chunk of cancers in the same way we battle viruses, the fight against cancer may have gotten a whole lot more promising.

In Controlling Cancer, Ewald argues that HPV is far from alone as a cancer-causing pathogen. He points to hepatitis viruses, which are known to cause liver cancer, and the bacteria Helicobacter pylori, which lives in the human stomach and can cause gastic cancer. It stands to reason, Ewald argues, that a lot of the pathogens that make us sick also push us towards cancer. For many viruses, bacteria, protozoans, and animal parasites, it pays to spur cells to replicate quickly and to evade the immune system.

If a lot of cancer is caused by infections, then we may be in a fortunate situation. We can save millions of lives with well-established measures. It doesn't take a miracle drug to block the transmission of hepatitis C, for example. Stopping people from using dirty needles will do just fine. Vaccinations could annihilate some kinds of cancer altogether.

It's a provocative idea, which is par for the course for Ewald. He's long been an advocate for putting medicine on a solid foundation of evolutionary biology. In the 1990s, for example, he came to fame for his ideas about domesticating infectious diseases. The deadliness of a parasite can evolve, and in some situations, it may pay for parasites to be milder instead of meaner. He went on to argue that many supposed chronic diseases–from heart disease to schizophrenia–are triggered by pathogens. Ewald's work has been mostly theoretical–extrapolating from what we know about evolution in general to diseases in particular. His ideas are tough to test, if only because our bodies are so complex. But they have certainly been influential, as scientists have developed better tools for detecting microbes in our bodies and probe their effects on us.

Controlling Cancer is one of the first works published by TED Books–an offshoot of the hugely popular TED talks. (Here's Paul Ewald's 2008 TED talk on domesticating disease.) TED talks are crisp, quick, emphatic, and not too heavy on scientific detail. Their books are, too. Controlling Cancer is a quick read, without any photographs, videos, or other ornaments found on other ebooks. It does include footnotes, where Ewald back up most of his points.

The citations are a good thing, but sometimes it's hard to tell when Ewald citing well-established cases of pathogens causing cancer and when he's only pointing to suggestive hints. The scientific literature is loaded with papers in which researchers describe tumors brimming with viruses. These associations could be evidence of viruses triggering cancer, or they could be evidence that tumors are good places for viruses to breed.

Ewald does point out that this ebook is just a precis of a longer book that's in the works. Controlling Cancer intrigues me enough that I look forward to Ewald making his case in full.

Zimmer author photo square Carl Zimmer writes frequently about science for the New York Times and is the author of 13 books, including A Planet of Viruses

[Image: Dividing lung cancer cell/NIH]

Narrative and Neuroscience

Posted on February 23, 2012 by admin

Blindsight, by Chris Colin. The Atavist, 2011. (Kindle Single/ Atavist App / Nook / iBook)

Reviewed by Annalee Newitz

Blindsight is about what happens when narratives are interrupted, neurologically and socially. New York Times journalist Chris Colin offers a fascinating snapshot of the life-changing car accident of B-movie director Simon Lewis, whose biggest claim to fame (other than CHUD 2) was the comedy Look Who's Talking. After being hit by a van going over 70 mph, Lewis was left with one third of his right brain hemisphere shut down. But he survived, offering his doctors (and us) a stunning vista on what it feels like to live inside a very non-neurotypical brain.

Lewis spent years in recovery, living a kind of half-conscious existence in his parents' home, slowly learning to read, write, and make movies again. Despite his seemingly-miraculous return to Hollywood as a wannabe B-movie director, Lewis still thinks in ways that are almost impossible to imagine. He exists in a world of "flat time," where he remembers everything that's happened to him, but not in the correct order. He can't tell whether that meeting he had took place before or after lunch. It gives him, Colin says, a contemplative, peaceful outlook on life – one that's earned him speaking gigs at Deepak Chopra conferences, and attracted hundreds of thousands of people to his online lectures about consciousness.

More interesting than Lewis' experience of flat time, however, is his peculiar form of blindness. Though he can't consciously see anything in his left visual field, he can still — unconsciously — pick up the shapes and colors in that part of his vision. In one test, a doctor held up a piece of paper and Lewis couldn't see the paper but knew what color it was. He's been diagnosed with "blindsight," a condition in which brain injuries render a person blind – but with some cognitive loopholes that permit sight. In Lewis' case, the effect has been that he believes his mind is functioning on a subconscious level as much as it is on a conscious one.

What does it feel like to live inside such a mind? That's been the focus of Lewis' work since teaching himself to read and write again — he has plans to make a movie based on his unusual way of experiencing the world. Unfortunately his main insight appears to be similar to what you might read in a new age holistic health book. "He's come to regard [his perceptions] as a kind of sieve," Colin writes, "one that oddly inclines him toward more substantive perceptions and omits the frivolous."

One yearns for Colin to provide a kind of scientific counterpoint to Lewis' subjective experiences, explaining what possible neurological mechanisms underly them. In the Atavist app version, we do get lengthy additional text that fills in some of this background, but it might have worked better in the main body of the text itself. That's ultimately the main flaw in this essay. We don't get the outside perspective that would place Lewis' story in a larger context. Still, it's well worth reading, especially for Colin's insight into what happens to a man whose life revolves around storytelling when he loses his ability to view and to plot the narrative of his own life.

A note on text vs. app: I originally read this essay as a Kindle Single, which had none of the multimedia features of the Atavist app. When I read the Atavist version, there were a few extras, such as the scientific footnotes and some photos, which were a welcome addition. But most of the extras, like maps of every place mentioned in the story and a "timeline" of Lewis' life, were unnecessary.

Annalee Newitz is the editor-in-chief of io9.com, and is currently writing a book about how we'll survive the next mass extinction.