Steven Gilbert Really, Really Wants You to Know About Poison

Posted on March 29, 2012 by admin

A Small Dose of Toxicology, 2nd edition, by Steven G. Gilbert, 2011, E-pub, Kindle, pdf,

Reviewed by Deborah Blum

In 2004, a Seattle-based researcher, Steven Gilbert, published a 280-page paperback titled A Small Dose of Toxicology. You might not guess from that modest title that the author was on a scientist on a crusade. But he was. He is.

"It's critical that we scientists be more engaged with the public," he says."We're talking about environmental issues that are having a bigger and bigger impact on our lives." He had big goals for the book too – he wanted it to contribute to public awareness, to encourage people to demand more of a government response, greater corporate responsbility. He wanted it to change things: "We have an ethical responsibility to our children."

Gilbert had a long-time background in the study of poisonous things. He received a PhD in toxicology from the University of Rochester in 1986. He was founder of the non-profit Institute of Neurotoxicology and Neurological Disorders in Seattle, an affiliate professor at the University of Washington. His particular area of study was in the area of low-dose exposures to toxic chemicals, an area that he was uneasily aware remained poorly understood.

And after some years, he just wasn't sure that the paperback was having the hoped for effect. Or that his publisher was particularly enthusiastic. So he decided to take it on as a DIY project. "I was originally disappointed. Then, I thought, well I could do this myself." First, he started a website, Toxipedia, which provides a free, searchable database of information on toxic chemicals. And then he started his own e-book publishing company, Healthy World Press, and published the second edition of A Small Dose of Toxicology himself.

The book is one of three now published by Healthy World and all follow the same model. They are offered as free downloads in either e-pub, Kindle, or pdf format from the Toxipedia website. There's a requested donation to Gilbert's non-profit but it's not required. "My first goal wasn't to make money," he said. "It was to have an impact."

I contacted Gilbert after discovering his e-book on the Toxipedia site. This was not, um, my first visit there in search of poisonous information. It's a natural consequence of writing a book about poisons and blogging on that same subject over the last few years. Really. Although sometimes I worry that the search history on my hard drive, riddled with visits to Toxipedia, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, and their ilk suggests the habits of a fairly iffy character.

But anyway – and more to the point, I recognized in Gilbert's work an awareness not unlike my own - that we exist in a chemical world, that we've yet to map that complicated terrain or fully understand its risks. And that as our adventures in chemistry – taking as a simple example, rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – change our planet, there's an imperative need to do tell that story better.

Still I was curious.

One can admire the crusade and still wonder if it's actually accomplishing anything. I wondered whether Gilbert's decision to go to e-self publishing improved the paper product in any meaningful way. And it's with those questions in mind that I now want to address the book directly. For comparison purposes, I downloaded it in two different versions on my iPad, as an e-pub (which went direct to my iBooks library) and as a pdf. It's also possible to simply read the book on-line here.

At its most basic, A Small Dose of Toxicology remains a reader-friendly reference book. As my pdf version tells me, it's still 280 pages. It has 21 chapters (although I had to count them because in the e-version, they are not numbered in the table of contents). The book starts with an overview – "Toxicology and You" , followed by a brief history of poisons and their studies, followed by chapters that focus on a specific toxic substance or issue. The first three chapters do this through a lens of everyday consumption: alcohol, caffeine, nicotine. The book then explores such famously poisonous materials as arsenic, mercury and lead before moving onto subjects such as as endocrine disrupters and radiation exposure.

In other words , it contains many small doses of information about many toxic things. You can see exactly why a poison-obsessed writer like myself would go for the material. But the better thing about it is that it's not written for someone like me. Gilbert is aiming for a more general audience (he tells me he hopes to see it used in high school classrooms) and he succeeds in making this a solidly written, clear, and occasionally fascinating exploration of toxic chemistry.

Of course, it's hard to make poison too boring. Still, he has a nice technique of using everyday examples to create level-headed explanations, for instance in this section on calculating a toxic dose:

"There are approximately 100 mg of caffeine in a cup of coffee. The actual amount of caffeine depends on the coffee beans, how the coffee was prepared, and size of the cup. And adult weighing 155 pounds (about 70 kg) who consumes this cup of coffee would receive a dose of 100 mg divided by 70 kg or 1.4 mg/kg of caffeine. The importance of including body weight becomes clear if you consider a child who weighs 5 kg (about 11 pounds). If this child consumed the same amount of coffee, the dose would be 100 mg/5 kg or 20 mg/kg, more than ten times higher than the adults."

And he weaves such examples throughout his story, later calculating the half-life of a cup of coffee in the body (about four hours), later again looking at the effect of pregnancy on that half-life question: "During the last two trimesters of pregnancy, caffeine metabolism decreases, and the half-life increases to about twice normal, or 8-10 hours. This means that after caffeine consumption both the material blood levels and the infant's exposure will stay higher for a longer period of time."

These facts and examples are neatly ordered. Each chapter begins with a "quick facts" chart, followed by a history of the specific poison and its use in society (lead in pipes and paint, mercury in thermometers and so forth), followed by case studies – the recent discovery of lead in children's lunch boxes where it was used to stabilize the plastic – followed by information about health effects, ongoing research, and government regulations.

Occasionally, though, the author goes beyond textbook into advocacy: "We need to reduce the use of lead in a wide range of consumer products," Gilbert writes in the chapter about that heavy metal. These opinionated moments and his sense of story telling, lift the book beyond standard textbook. Although I suspect that also means that it won't appeal to readers from the anti-environmental movement.

But, you may ask, couldn't he present the advocacy and information just as neatly in a print format? And I've come to believe that he couldn't. Oh, the downloaded books have some of the usual glitches we find in these early days of e-book publishing. I complained earlier that the table of contents in the pdf version didn't provide page numbers for chapters. The iBook version I downloaded skipped the table of contents entirely (I could have tried again for a better result but I just flipped over to the pdf for the information).

But, but, the e-version does work in ways that would just not be possible in print – by which I mean that it offers a dazzling array of live links to additional information and resources. The introduction is followed by four pages of links to regulatory agencies and other organizations around the world that archive information on toxic materials. Further links stud the text and there are yet more at the end of each chapter. Not to mention links to graphics, powerpoints, interactive posters.

Gilbert is especially proud of his Milestones of Toxicology poster, which you can link to from the book or here from the website. The poster has now been translated into ten languages, mostly recently Arabic. A Chinese translation is in the works. He also likes the idea that as publisher of his own e-book, he can keep it updated. When I talked to him, he was already planning to add new research papers into the book and, in fact, planning a third edition that would make better use of his website and contain more hyperlinks to Toxipedia.

Yes, empire-building already out in the digital universe. But in a good cause. We really do need to know more about poison.

Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer-prize winning science writer and the author of five books, most recently the best-selling The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. She is a professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The Pioneer of Print

Posted on March 12, 2012 by Carl Zimmer

Gutenberg the Geek: History's First Technology Entrepreneur and Silicon Valley's Patron Saint by Jeff Jarvis Kindle Single

Review by Kevin Bonham (guest reviewer)

There's something delightfully transgressive in writing an essay celebrating Johannes Gutenberg, the man who invented the printing press, and publishing it in a medium that may end the dominance of his creation. In fact, in his new Kindle single Gutenberg the Geek, Jeff Jarvis wastes no time with sentimentality over the decline of print. Instead, he argues that Gutenberg should be an inspiration to present day entrepreneurs and "the patron saint of Silicon Valley." It might seem strange to review an ebook about the printing press on a site dedicated to science writing, but bear with me. Jarvis argues that we are in a period of upheaval that parallels the upheaval of the 15th century, where the internet plays the disruptive role that the printing press once did, and he believes that the consequences for society may be more profound than we realize.

The eerie similarities between the printing press and the internet that Jarvis describes would be familiar to anyone that's read his blog, but may surprise newcomers. From cashflow problems and venture capital to secrecy and idea-stealing competitors, Gutenberg had to deal with many of the same challenges as today's technology entrepreneurs. Jarvis describes how

Gutenberg — just like a modern-day startup — depended on exploiting new efficiencies, achieving scale, reusing assets, dividing specialized labor, and setting standards. Thus a new industry — indeed, perhaps manufacturing itself — was born.

Jarvis does not contribute any new scholarship on Gutenberg here – he freely admits that his historical exposition is taken entirely from other authors. But for those not well acquainted with 15th century Europe, he does a good job condensing previous work on Gutenberg to set the stage. Beginning with Gutenberg's childhood in the German city of Mainz, we're introduced to an era rife with conflict. Nobility battled for control over resources and oppressed peasants rose up against their lords. Throw in a debt crisis (with Gutenberg's hometown playing the role of Greece) and political upheaval (the Reformation rather than the Arab Spring) and Jarvis makes it easy to see echoes of the past in present day circumstances.

Continue reading “The Pioneer of Print” →

The state of the eBook, early 2012

Posted on February 22, 2012 by admin

by John Timmer

It's easy to forget that it's only been five years since Sony and Amazon first started targeting consumers with dedicated eReading hardware. Over the past few years, the painfully slow eInk screens have gotten much faster, while the hardware itself received a touch interface, active color screens, and is now facing tough competition from tablets that let users do a whole lot more than read. The rapid pace of change has pushed authors, publishers, and content distributors into a period of experimentation, compelling many to try new means of displaying and distributing their works.

Before we started looking at the results of some of that experimentation, we thought we'd step back and look at where things stand right now. What follows is a rough breakdown of the different forms book content is taking as tablets take off, and what those forms mean for authors and publishers.

Basic eBooks: These are the equivalents of regular books in electronic form, typically the ePub, PDF, and Kindle formats. These allow some basic control over formatting and chapters, but the format really doesn't add much over traditional forms of publication. The biggest advantage of these books is that they can run on the widest range of devices, from the eInk screens of low-end Kindles to the active screen of the iPads. That said, the experiences on these different devices aren't identical. Complex diagrams, color images, and most photos don't display very well on the eInk screen, so the experience will be decidedly worse for anything that relies on those to get its message across.

Supported devices: Just about everything. Desktops and laptops running the Mac OS and Windows. All the existing tablets running Android and the iOS. Dedicated eReader hardware from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Sony, and others.

Opportunity for innovation: Limited. Mostly, by limiting the costs (in time and money) involved in putting a book together, the basic eBooks make it much easier to publish shorter works and collections. They also make self-publishing a viable option.

Staying power: These formats are not going away. They're perfectly fine for many purposes, and the device manufacturers that opted for eInk screens have a large base of book buyers to cater to.

Enhanced eBooks: Think of these as an entire website in eBook form. Navigation can be non-linear, and it's easy to include video and audio content, zoomable images and diagrams, and other interactive media. Detailed color photos and diagrams can be displayed and zoomed. These are not only a big step up from basic eBooks, but they're a big step up from books in general, providing a degree of interactivity that just isn't possible otherwise. All this makes things like science textbooks and children's literature a viable option.

Like basic eBooks, however, the enhanced versions require stand-alone software for managing and displaying content—examples include The Atavist and Apple's updated iBooks. It looks like Amazon and Barnes & Noble may have enhanced book viewing software on their tablets as well. Most of this software, however, is not cross-platform, so choosing one locks you in to a subset of the tablet market.

Supported devices: Tablets running Android and the iOS. eInk screens simply can't handle multimedia, complex images, or interactivity.

Opportunity for innovation: Pretty high, since you can do so much more. But enhanced eBooks still need to be viewed on dedicated software, so they'll necessarily be limited to the features that software supports.

Staying power: Each one of the software platforms mentioned above will have its own dedicated authoring system and display software. Most of these are tied to specific hardware. It's not likely that all of them will remain viable indefinitely.

Stand alone applications: At the high end, the boundaries between a book and an application is getting very blurry. It's possible to make a bundle that contains both the book content and the enhanced eBook viewing software, which can then be distributed as an application. But, for some content, the text is only part of a larger experience, which may involve detailed 3D renderings, user input, and other features that can only be provided by a bespoke application.

Opportunity for innovation: Enormous. Anything that can be done on the tablet is an option.

Staying power: Although a couple of the tablet platforms are on life support—WebOS and Blackberry—Android and the iOS look like they'll be here for a while. Both platforms, however, are adding features at a high rate, so it's possible that some standalone apps will eventually become outdated.

Supported devices: Tablets again, with apps being platform specific. For the Fire, iPad, and Nook, the manufacturer's approval is required to get your app on the platform.

Our reviews will cover material from all of these categories, although we'll shy away from content that's a straight translation of a print book to eBook form. For basic eBooks, we'll focus on the new formats and collections that electronic publishing has made viable. For everything else, we'll try to evaluate how the rich multimdia capabilities of tablets enhance (or, if it's the case, detract from) the reading experience. And we'll try to make sure that we look at the most innovative approaches to handling content we can find.

And that's where you can help us out. If you're aware of any science-focused eBooks that seem worth paying attention to, please let us know about them.

John Timmer spent 15 years doing scientific research before deciding he'd rather write about it. He's now the science editor of the technology news site Ars Technica. He received a Kindle on the day Amazon first introduced them, and has been following eBook and eReader technology ever since.

A New Kind of Review for a New Kind of Book

Posted on January 28, 2012 by Carl Zimmer

By Carl Zimmer

If you are curious about the world–about its galaxies, its clouds, its quarks, its crickets–then you probably own at least a few books about science. Or you have a lot. The book–by which I mean bound sheets of paper marked by moveable type–is one of the best devices for storing and retrieving information about science. It is also the kind of device we can fall in love with. On my own shelves, I have new books that are bringing me up to date on genome biology and dark matter, as well as dinged-up old books, such as a paperback edition of The Origin of Species, Stephen Jay Gould's The Panda's Thumb, and The Encyclopedia of Plagues and Pestilence. We dip back into old books, or reread them in full, and they thus keep us company through our time on this planet.

This relationship to science books is less than 500 years old. As soon as Gutenberg introduced movable type, he ignited a fierce demand for books about science. Vesalius published the first modern book about anatomy, On the Fabric of the Human Body, in 1543, and he sold 4000 copies in a matter of months. (Pirated editions cropped up soon as well.) Some science books were written by experts for experts, often in Latin, but many others were intended for a wider audience. In 1638, the natural philosopher John Wilkins published The Discovery of a World in the Moone. The book–which Wilkins wrote in English–introduced Great Britain to the ideas of Copernicus and Galileo. Nearly four centuries after Wilkins took his readers to the moon, a healthy flow of new science books are published each year.

We may now be at a new stage in the history of science books. In just the past few years, tens of millions of people have bought tablets–iPads, Kindles, Nooks, and more–on which they are reading books. In many cases, they are just reading digitized versions of traditional printed books. For these readers, ebooks are distinguished only by convenience. You can read an edition of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks that weighs a few ounces, or you can read one that is a stream of bits stored along with a hundred other science books in your phone.

When media change, however, possibilities change with them. Vesalius knew this 460 years ago. His book had two parts: the text, in which he explained how human anatomy work; and the art, in the form of 200 woodblocks based on Vesalius's knowledge of the human body from autopsies. Vesalius packed the manuscript and the woodblocks on mules and sent them over the Alps to Basel, Switzerland, with explicit instructions. Every copy of the book had the same exquisitely accurate, enlightening mix of art and text. Vellum scrolls could never have held Vesalius's dream.

Ebooks are once again redrawing the boundaries. Walk into a book store and look at the science section. Most of the books are between about 200 and 400 pages. Most are created by large publishing houses. There's nothing fundamentally wrong about a 50-page book, of course. It just doesn't fit comfortably into the publishing business–a business that has to contend with costs for printing books, storing them in warehouses, shipping them to book stores, and accepting returned books. Ebooks create an economic space for the very short book (and the very long one). They also allow authors to reach readers without having to persuade a publisher that their book will earn back an investment.

A tablet can display the text of a book, but that's only one of an infinite number of tasks it can carry out. It can illustrate a book with video instead of a static picture. Instead of Vesalius's two-dimensional masterpieces, an anatomy book can include a three-dimensional body that the reader can explore with flicks of fingers.

Some people question whether such a creations really are "books." Aren't we just talking about oversized magazine articles and text-heavy apps? We may not be able to answer that question for a while, as we experiment with creating and reading these newly hatched things.

Many of the necessary elements are falling into place for this experiment. Programming is becoming painless and powerful. Readers can buy ebooks with a tap on a sheet of glass. And there are enough readers now that they can conceivably support a community of ebook authors.

But there's something missing in between. It is still tough for readers to discover new science ebooks. Traditional book reviews limit themselves to works on paper. Some ebooks may appear in computer magazines, but buried in reviews of laptops and printers. In between, we need a community.

Download the Universe is a step towards that community. It is the work of a group of writers and scientists who are deeply intrigued by the future of science books. (You can find our names and links to our web sites on the right.) Here we review science ebooks–broadly defined, except for ebooks that are just spin-offs of print books. We hope to build up a library of titles that curious readers can browse. Some reviews will be positive, others negative. We welcome your own judgments, and we look forward to vibrant (but civilized) discussions in the comment threads. We will also write essays from time to time about the changes that publishing is undergoing.

As we continue to build Download the Universe, we may change our minds about the scope of its mission. We can't say what those changes will be. We can only be sure they will be here before too long.

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

[Images–Vesalius: NIH, App: Apple]