Alexander Humboldt's broadreaching influence on modern science (Books - The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf)

Andrea Wulf's biography The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015) shares the irrepresable energy of her subject. Wulf convincingly contends that the German-born explorer, adventurer, scientist, and author (1769 - 1859) was the creator of our modern understanding of the natural world. His interests extended from volcanoes to plant-life, to climate, to the cosmos and his influence can be seen in the way we comprehend nature as something not to be ruled, but as something that human beings exist within - something complex and "alive." Humboldt is an ideal subject for reconsideration in a modern scientific biography.  Wulf paints a picture of Humboldt as a contemporary outsider, offering strong support that he was gay.  He warned in the 19th century of the impact humans could exert on climate. Finally, his expertise of the natural world was preserved in dozens of volumes that were appreciated as much as repositories of factual information as they were for their poetry. This passion helped father the contemporary environmental movement, influencing naturalists Darwin, Thoreau, and Muir.  It can arguably be appreciated in our own era's melding of the arts and sciences in an effort to broaden understanding of our small place but potentially devastating impact in a very large and complex system.

3-D tour through brain space for Brain Awareness Week

I talked to curious students about the Brain at BiobBase yesterday and took a really amazing tour through a 3-D brain in a planetarium...no, really.  Check out my Brain Awareness Week blog by clicking here and scrolling down.

Ted at TED-Ed - on the brain, naturally.

I recently co-created a neuroscience lesson for TED-Ed.  It just went live.  Check us out!

Distinguishing between data & interpretation in popular science can help the public learn to think about the evidence (Books - The Organized Mind by Daniel J. Levitin)

Nowadays, the outcome of every scientific study is expected to be instantly useable by the public.  News media demands ready-made dietary and medical advice, politicians and business people demand data to shore up the opinions they already hold, many funders want only outcomes that will translate to curing disease now.  As nice as it would be to cure on demand, that would be as likely as making a hits of every Broadway tryout.  Scientific "hits" are the product of fortuitous accident and incremental accumulation of knowledge, which usually includes more rejected possibilities than confirmed ones.

Pop-neuroscience satisfies this expectation with books falling somewhere between science and self-help.  Daniel J. Levitin's The Organized Mind (Dutton, 2014) creatively hews to this formula. I thank Dutton, a Penguin imprint, for my copy.  Of course the popularity of science, is not all bad.  It is wonderful to have the ear of non-scientists and encouraging that interest requires that the public enter the discussion somewhere.  But books that realistically convey how experimental outcomes find their way into the fund of general knowledge are in short supply.  The wider the dissemination of half-baked knowledge, the more discerning the eager-to-consume non-scientist must become.  In this age in which everything from raw experimental data and top notch interpretation to crackpot appropriation of small study outcomes and outright lies are easily available on line, and look superficially the same, the scientist has a responsibility to help the public develop a critical eye.

Wet your whistle over a little science...

I'm a big fan of grass roots projects that advance the public understanding of science. Large scale and television infotainment are great for the numbers of people they reach, but there is nothing like one person meeting with another in a small relaxed setting for engaging and sometimes even changing minds.  A group of scientists began a venture in England called Pint of Science, where scientists meet a bunch of interested thirsty folks in a pub and give a talk aimed towards a general listener about their work - over a pint, of course.  That venture has crossed the pond.  Talks over libations will be held in pubs in 5 different cities across the U.S. - New York, Chicago, Tampa, Philadelphia, and San Diego. Topics range from environmental science genetics, and particle physics, to stem cells, antibiotics, and neuroscience.  Have them wet your whistle at Pint of Science U.S.

Fragmented genius became the conscience of 20th century physics (Books - Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center by Ray Monk)

I have finally finished Ray Monk's behemoth of a biography Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center (Doubleday, 2012).  It's strength is its comprehensiveness.  There doesn't seem to be a thought Oppenheimer had, or an event surrounding him, that Monk does not cover in depth.  The man and his times (1904 - 1967) are fascinating for the advances that occurred in the field of physics, Oppenheimer's leadership of the construction of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, his subsequent leadership of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, and for the stripping of Oppenheimer's security clearance by Senator McCarthy's infamous House Un-American Activities Committee.  However, as I mentioned in my initial thoughts a few weeks back, I found Monk's biography lacking in coherence and narrative drive. It's ironic, given the book's subtitle, that it seemed to have no center.

At the corner of science and culture...

At the corner of science and culture sits a mollusk, a Nautilus, to be exact.  While we're both waiting for me to post something bookish, check out this innovative and sharp looking new magazine and blog.  Each issue has a theme, a new chapter is released each week.  This week, find out why fish are all blissed out.

Jeffrey Hawkins Writer likes to say that the average drop of water entering the Mississippi River headwaters north of Minnesota will be used 11 times before it reaches the Gulf of Mexico. That drop might irrigate crops, flow through wastewater treatment plants, pour out of residential taps, move through digestive systems, arc into toilet bowls, swirl down into sewers, and then do it over again. Whatever its fate along its 2,300-mile journey South, this water will mix with all kind of chemicals, human metabolites, and unnatural compounds.

On self-limiting enzymes, playfullness in science, and mothers... (Books - The Statue Within by Francois Jacob)

Over the last ten days, I attended the annual conference of the International Society for Autism Research, in San Sebastian Spain, where I presented some of my research and heard about the work of many, many others.  It was impressive to see the huge amount and diversity of efforts focused on autism spectrum disorders.  On my travels there and to nearby Barcelona, I also managed to get a little reading done.

I had started The Statue Within, the memoir of French biologist Francois Jacob a while ago, but never really got going.  The conference put me in the mood to pick it up off the pile again and just as I began, I learned that Dr. Jacob had died at 92 years of age.  Dr. Jacob's contribution to our understanding of how living organisms work was to be the first to observe and describe how the level of an enzyme produced in a bacterium can be responsive to its environment, eventually earning him, Jacques Monod and and Andre Lwoff the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965.  He saw that e. coli, for example, could digest the sugar lactose for energy instead of glucose, but it produced the necessary digestive enzyme (lactase) only when lactose was present.  How was this possible?  It was learned around the same time that the production of any protein (such as an enzyme) was the product of certain sequences in our DNA (we call those sequences genes).  These sequences became a template for RNA which, in turn, became a template for the production of a protein. The e. coli's genes were always equipped to produce lactase but, typically, a repressor (also a protein) was bound to the portion of our DNA responsible for producing lactase.  In the presence of lactose, the repressor binds lactose instead of those genes.  This accomplishes two things: 1) the lifting of the repression which means that the genes facilitate the production of lactase which digests the lactose and 2) it creates a self-limiting loop such that, when the lactose is gone, the repressor then binds the DNA once again and the production of lactase is turned-off.  This was important to biology not just in understanding how e. coli are responsive to their environment, but because this model extends to any gene in any organism. Dr. Jacob and Jacques Monod realized for us that genes interact with their environment.  Genes being present in an organism are not sufficient to accomplishing their action, they must be turned on" by some signal or, to use the term biologists use, they must be "expressed."  Although, as is always true with biology, it is now understood that this is a general principle and this simple mechanism is, in fact, be varied upon and complicated infinitely.

Scientist as harridan, Hollywood icon, and bad dresser

Dr. Patricia Fara, historian of science at Cambridge, bemoans in Nature today the role biographers have played in reinforcing stereotypes of women in the sciences and mathematics in Women in Science: Weird Sisters?.

It seems that being an ordinary woman with a stellar scientific career is simply not enough: to be marketable, she must also be odd. Dust jackets entice purchasers by rebranding an overlooked character as a unique female individual — in other words, as a weird woman.

Converting female scientists into publishing opportunities may sell books, but it does the cause of equality in science no favours.  

Her critique offers a list of recent biographies which, despite any shortcomings, profile some important scientists such as Rosalind Franklin, Dr. Jocelyn Bell, and, Hedy Lamarr, no really.

The allure of the counterintuitive - is it good or bad for science?

There is a good critique on how the popular press hypes social science research in The American Scholar: The Allure of the Counterintuitive by Jessica Love.  Well worth a look.  I very much agree with her point that the press gives very little space to studies which are

incremental, for work that shores up and teases apart, for work that complicates, for work on the boundary conditions...

But Love seems to feel that the appeal of the counterintuitive is damaging to science because people will be so entrained to hype that they will not support studying brain processes that appear to be obvious.  However,  I would argue that interest in counterintuitive conclusions is an opportunity to argue for why we study the brain, its behaviors, and its less visible processes (like the electrical and chemical signalling whose outcome are our cognitive functions) in the first place.  Even though our minds are are own, we do not have conscious access to all its processes.  This is an opportunity to explain just that, and in the case of neuroscience conclusions are even less obvious.   Although our minds 'think' our neurons do not.  We do not know before studying brain processes which hypotheses will confirm our common sense notions and which will not. So, while I get a little tired of "hey wow" science and do not like inaccurate popular press interpretations of studies, the allure of the counterintuitive offers an opportunity to better explain critical thinking and experimental processes if it is used well.

Hat tip: The Dish

The limits of genius (Books - Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann)

Daniel Kehlmann is a popular German-born writer living in Austria.  With Measuring the World (Quercus, 2007) he has taken the biographies of mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and scientist Alexander von Humbolt as the jumping off point for a novel which vividly and amusingly imagines their inner lives.  Contemporaneous to the late 18th to early 19th centuries, Gauss and Humboldt were endowed with brilliant minds which saw novel ways to answer questions (and defeat strongly held but untested assumptions) about the world in which we live.  Both took on the entire world as their subject - the height of its peaks, the composition and temperature of its core, the shape of planetary orbits, the path of the ocean's currents, the very shape of space - but their methods of measurement couldn't have been more different.  While Humboldt shocked his own spine in testing the nervous system's ability to conduct electricity and travelled to the far reaches of the world at considerable risk to himself - he couldn't pass an Andean peak without climbing it or a mine shaft without dropping himself in - Gauss preferred to make his measurements without leaving his armchair.

Negotiating science in politics (Books - The Art and Politics of Science by Harold Varmus)

Before taking off for points east, I read The Art and Politics of Science a sciency memoir by Harold Varmus, whose Nobel Prize-winning work helped reveal the connection between viral oncogenes and cancer.  Dr. Varmus ran the National Institutes of Health (NIH) during the Clinton presidency and now heads Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, one of the leading research and treatment facilities for cancer in the world.  It is his success in the combined realm of science and policy-making that made me most interested in reading this swift-moving, easy-going account of a singularly impressive career. Owing to my backlog of posts I will attempt to keep this brief.

Compelling biography of a monster (Books - The Emperor of all Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee)

Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of all Maladies is an impressive book in two ways.  It is a comprehensive history of cancer made plain for the lay-reader - what science and medicine have understood its mechanisms to be and how, as that understanding has changed, its treatment has changed.  It is also a book about one of the scourges of modern life - 1 in 3 people will likely develop a cancer in their lifetime and 1 in 4 will probably die of one.  It is a monster most of us fear and Mukherjee's achievement is having produced a book that keeps the reader wanting to turn the pages as one does when reading a mystery or a thriller.

Positive Deviant Alert

Two positive deviants attracted my attention lately:

Natalie Angier profiled physicist Dr. Mildred Spiewak Dresselhaus, a New Yorker who defied the odds for women in science thanks to the encouragement of the Nobel laureate and medical physicist Dr. Rosalyn Yalow.  She studied with Enrico Fermi at University of Chicago and then began her own research on carbon at MIT half a century ago.

Dr. Dresselhaus has also been a prominent advocate for women in physics and engineering, disciplines that are still short on high-ranking female faces and that were outright hostile to women when she began her career in the late 1950s. Even before entering science, she was well accustomed to hostility and hard times, having grown up impoverished in a rough part of the Bronx.

Our favorite design magazine The World of Interiors, an English publication, featured an essay in the latest issue by the blogger and author of the book Spitalfields Life. Check this excellent blog out.  It offers affectionate and energic appreciations of the history and contemporary culture of the hip and energetic Spitalfields neighborhood of London.  The author's mission:

Over the coming days, weeks, months and years, I am going to write every single day and tell you about life here in Spitalfields at the heart of London. How can I ever describe the exuberant richness and multiplicity of culture in this place to you?  This is both my task and my delight.

Let me disclose to you the hare-brained ambition I am pursuing, which is to write at least ten thousand stories about Spitalfields life. At the rate of one a day, this will take approximately twenty-seven years and four months. Who knows what kind of life we shall be living in 2037 when I write my ten thousandth post?

The adventure of filling the gap (Books - Remarkble Creatures by Sean B. Carroll)

Molecular biologist Sean B. Carroll wrote Remarkable Creatures (Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009) to both capture the excitement of scientific discoveries and communicate their meaning within the context of evolutionary biology. In relating the journeys of scientists in this National Book Award finalist, he acknowledges a debt to authors C. W. Ceram - Gods, Graves, and Scholars, a classic work about archeology - and Paul de Kruif - Microbe Hunters, mini-biographies of pioneers in microbiology, a work to which I owe my initial love of science.

Remarkable Creatures is a clearly written and passionate account of how field science gets done.  Its subject may not seem as relevant to the average reader as popular works about healthcare or how our brains learn, but one could say it is of even greater significance

The costs and incentives of doing science (Books - How Economics Shapes Science by Paula Stephan)

The Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, has been trying to lure a top university to create a school of engineering and applied science in NYC.  In fact, he sweetened the deal by offering $100 million, claiming that the investment is worth far more in future start-up businesses and the jobs and products they would create. Is this project really going to spawn the creation of a new silicon valley in NYC or is Mayor Bloomberg overstating the impact of one school?  Paul Stephan's new book How Economics Shapes Science is a thorough, data-rich analysis that can help us consider such questions.

Get out of the lab: scientists communicating with the world (Books - Am I Making Myself Clear, Don't be Such a Scientist, Escape from the Ivory Tower)

As I approach the home stretch of a PhD in neuroscience, I find that that the audience I most enjoy writing for about this cutting edge field is the general non-scientist reader. I read three books recently about scientists communicating with non-scientists. Am I Making Myself Clear by Cornelia Dean, Don't Be Such a Scientist by Randy Olson, and Escape from the Ivory Tower by Nancy Baron have in common a belief that most scientists do this poorly and, ironically, that they should do it more often. Too long winded, too technical, and too many qualifications are the main criticisms, and each volume offers advice on how to be more effective.

The usefulness of lying, genetically speaking (The Folly of Fools by Robert Trivers)

Acerbic critique of Robert Trivers's new book on evolutionary biology Deceit and Self Deception, by Jenny Diski in The Guardian this week (hat tip: Book Slut).

...Now, decades on, he has arrived at a big, new universal theory, also essentially based on the arithmetic of gene selection. Deceit is useful where telling the (unpleasant) truth would hamper your progress. Progress towards what? Trivers would say your fitness, which is defined as raising the chances of replicating your genes into the next generation.
Your genes, apparently, would agree with him; but they would, wouldn't they? That is if they were capable of agreeing. I want to hang on to the fact that the building blocks of ourselves do not want or intend anything.

A noisy signal buried among amusing anecdotes and formulae (Books - Noise by Bart Kosko)

Noise, Bart Kosko, tells us, is unwanted sound. In everyday life we might use the word to describe the car alarm we hear blaring off the street while we are trying to sleep, or the background music in a restaurant that obscures the words of the person with whom I'm conversing. The sciences have a specific use for the term noise.

On the edge of chaos and some kind of order (Books - Europa, The Great Journey, At Home in the Universe)

I have the second of my comprehensive exams coming up. Although this has not resulted in reading nothing at all, it has meant that I have not finished anything. I guess I'm a less constant reader these days. Anyhoo, I thought I'd report on what's in the works.

Tim Parks's Europa (1997) concerns Jerry, a philandering middle-aged English professor and writer living in Milan, who considers the hash he has made of his life while he rides on a bus to the European Petition Committee to air grievances regarding his college's teaching contracts. With an international group of faculty and students who posture, who lecture, who flirt, drink, try to impress, to get into each others' pants, all while Dead Poet's Society plays on the bus video system in the background. It's written as a first-person monologue that switches from interior to exterior perspectives, a sort of string of pathetic parenthetical justifications for his screwed up marriage and loss of ambition, laced with bitter whining about "totties" who will and won't put out.

Ordinarily I detest novels with misogynist characters, set in academia (and that rules me out of quite a few). The fact that Tim Park's is himself an ex-pat Brit living in Milan translating Italian literature while teaching at a university adds an autobiographic layer that turns my impression of this book from a novel about misogynist characters to a misogynist novel, however, what I am finding impressive about the book is a) the ferocity of its voice: high-velocity sentences drive on and on in a rhythm that compels me to keep reading:

You should have a slug of this, boyo, Vikram Griffiths said, turning from trying to bribe the driver to take us into town in the evening of his own initiative without referring the time and expense to the coach company. You look terrible, he said, What's up? So, lying with the instinctive fluency that years of betrayal engender (and if one is lying one owes it to the world to do it well), I said the combination of the coach's movement and trying to watch Robin Williams seize the day had given me the most atrocious headache, and I told Vikram Griffiths, this feckless fragment of Empire (as he himself once described himself), this genius of broken marriage, bizarre manners and interminable good causes, this man who cam to my house just once, his dog only a puppy then, and frightened my wife with his life story - told him that I had come to the front of the coach to speak to him because I had heard, in the Chambersee Service Stations, Dimitra and Georg and her agreeing that he, Vikram, would have to be replaced, because incapable of putting a presentable face, I said (partly inventing, partly quoting), to our claims; he would make us look ridiculous, I said, they had said, with his unkempt baldness, his bushy sideburns and wild gestures.

and b) while this piece often feels grossly personal either about the narrator, the writer, or both, it also manages to be a novel about the European Union. The EU, as you probably already know, is a supra-national body of independent governments charged with negotiating political and economic decisions made for the good of all its members while at the same time maintaining their autonomy. It's an arrangement that is a lot like, well, this narrator's relationships - with his employment, his marriage, his lover, his daughter. That may make it sound trite, but actually, it is a book driven by ideas while not being a book of ideas. Jerry is mostly outraged because his ex-paramour is now having an affair with someone else. The bus (a subset of the institute where he teaches) is polyglot. Everyone speaks a different language, has different priorities, and in the end they are all out for themselves, so no satisfactory union (or at least no easy union) is possible, the book seems to imply.

I am finding it particularly interesting how the interior personal concerns of this novel interact with the exterior, geo-political - exemplified in the seating arrangements on the coach as each rider vies to pair off with a suitable other as their roommate in the hotel that evening. It is striking me as I read that, if this were an American novel, the personal would not interact with the political but rather with the pervasive metaphor of technology or, these days, the brain. It's a different zeitgeist 14 years later. Even as I find myself liking the characters less and less, I am compelled by how Parks makes a dialogue of these two realms, and so I read on.

Speaking of ex-pats, historian David McCullough's latest book The Greater Journey tells the story of mostly well-known American writers, painters, and doctors who came to Paris between 1830 and 1900, that is, post- Napoleon and pre-World War I, what drove them there, and how that visit contributed to what they became. As with his fantastic biography of John Adams, McCullough links places, personages, and ideas with seamless narrative that is a pleasure to read. The experience of the month-long oceanic voyage, the contrasting squalor and splendor of 1830s Paris, the cholera epidemic of 1831, are all vividly portrayed. I am finding the contrast of the shared political influences of France and the United States, what staunch allies we were, and the difference in what French and American culture value in living daily life striking, particularly in light of the recent Strauss-Kahn scandal.

Lastly, Stuart Kauffman is feeding me lots of beautiful narrative about how a certain degree of complexity in a system can perpetuate self-organization out of initial chaos, particularly in the context of biology. In his book At Home in the Universe, Kauffman offers these self-organizing principles as endemic to all kinds of systems - economies, cultures, microscopic molecules, and macroscopic universes. He speaks particularly of when systems, such a the molecular morass that makes up the biosphere, are balanced along the edge of order and chaos and is talented at turning complex mathematical ideas into visual metaphors:

This poised edge of chaos is a remarkable place. It is a close cousin of recent remarkable findings in a theory physicists Per Bak, Chao Tang, and Kurt Wiesenfeld called self-organized criticality. The central image here is of a sandpile on a table onto which sand is added at a constant slow rate. Eventually, the sand piles up and avalanches begin. What one finds are lots of small avalanches and few large ones. If the size of the avalanche is plotted on the familiar x-axis of a Cartesian coordinate system [that's a conventional graph with two axes], and the number of avalanches at that size are plotted on the y-axis, a curve is obtained. The result is a relationship called a power law. The particular shape of this curve, to which we shall return in later chapters, has the stunning implication that the same-sized grain of sand can unleash small or large avalanches. Although we can say that in general there will be more tiny avalanches and only a few big landslides (that is the nature of a power-law distribution), there is no way to tell whether a particular one will be insignificant or catastrophic. ... At this poised state between order and chaos, the players cannot fortell the unfolding consequences of their actions. While there is law in the distribution of avalanche sizes that arise in the posed state, there is unpredictablility in each individual case...

In other words, you are going to have to do some work to follow Kauffman's argument, he is writing at a fairly sophisticated level. But he combines complex mathematics and biology with a real appreciation for the beauty of the world, which phenomena in it can be predicted, as well as which cannot. I'm finding the reading well worth it and the concepts applicable to all sorts of observable phenomena.