Few humans have been as successful in Hollywood as parasitoids. Parasitoids are a particularly gruesome kind of parasite that invariably kills its host by the time it becomes an adult and is ready to leave the host’s body. A parasitoid female wasp, to give one example, will fly along until it finds a caterpillar of some particular species. It lands on top of the caterpillar, jabs an egg-laying stinger into the caterpillar’s body, and injects some eggs. The eggs hatch, the wasp larvae feed on the living caterpillar from within, and then, when they’re ready to metamorphose into adults, they crawl out of their hapless host, leaving it to die.
Today’s issue of Newsday has my review of Sea of Glory, Nathaniel Philbrick’s history of the first great scientific U.S. expedition. The review gets pretty harsh towards the end, despite the fact that the book is an exquisitely researched narrative of a fascinating subject. (What makes it particularly fascinating is that the expedition’s leader, Charles Wilkes, was practically insane.) It’s this very potential that got me so frustrated. Here’s a grand story about a journey to the ends of the Earth, about megalomaniacs, about the dawn of a great nation, about the birth of modern science, about the tragic dimension of empire, and yet Philbrick writes about all this in a style that’s maddeningly pedestrian and dutiful. At one point he tries to offer some penetrating psychological insight into Wilkes’s psyche by quoting from the pop-psychology book Emotional Intelligence. It was one of those moments when you have to tell yourself not to throw the book against the wall.
Science, January 2, 2004
History has a way of repeating itself–even the history of science. Today we are witnessing a revolution in neuroscience, as researchers chart the circuitry of memory, cognition, and emotion, offering the promise of a chemically based medicine of the mind (1). But these same words would have been just as apt over 300 years ago, when neurology first emerged as an experimental science (2). In the mid-1600s, humanity’s understanding of the brain changed no less profoundly than it is changing today. Medieval concepts of the soul and spirits rapidly disappeared, replaced with a vision of the brain based on anatomy, chemistry, and physics.
By sheer coincidence (or some journalistic twist of fate) two magazine articles of mine are coming out this week, and they just so happen to make a nice neurological pairing.