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The Best American Science Writing 2010 [Paperback]

Jerome Groopman , Jesse Cohen
3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)

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Book Description

September 14, 2010 0061852511 978-0061852510

The eleventh edition of the popular annual series that Kirkus Reviews hails as “superb brain candy,” The Best American Science Writing 2010 is a sterling collection of the most crucial, thought-provoking, and engaging science writing of the year. Edited by New York Times bestselling author and New Yorker staff writer Jerome Groopman and series editor Jesse Cohen, The Best American Science Writing 2010 offers provocative looks at the latest scientific developments—from the fields of genetics, environmentalism, astronomy, biochemistry, and more—and is an absolute must read for any fan of popular science.


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Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

This yearly best-of shares three articles with The Best American Science and Nature Writing: 2010 but saliently differs by including medical articles. Editor Groopman picked good ones about strange things, such as Larissa MacFarquhar’s New Yorker look at people who donate their kidneys to strangers, Benedict Carey’s New York Times report about the comeback of the lobotomy (euphemized as the “cingulotomy”), and Steve Silberman’s Wired piece about the effectiveness of placebos. For such news-you-can-use, the hardcore periodical Science is not normally renowned, yet Groopman has extracted one for anyone who’s committed a social gaffe, “How to Think, Say, or Do Precisely the Worst Thing for Any Occasion.” Newsworthy topics represented herein include a profile of the late green-revolution agronomist Norman Borlaug, a Wired riposte to the irrational antivaccine movement, and psychologist Steven Pinker’s essay about personal DNA testing. Alas, a serpent lies coiled in science’s garden, as a Nation alarm about the drastic reduction of the media’s science coverage discloses. Help allay that decline by expanding the audience for Groopman’s 22 sharp-minded contributors. --Gilbert Taylor

From the Back Cover

Edited by New York Times bestselling author Jerome Groopman, The Best American Science Writing 2010 collects in one volume the most crucial, thought-provoking, and engaging science writing of the year. Distinguished by new and impressive voices as well as some of the foremost names in science writing—David Dobbs, Elizabeth Kolbert, and Larissa MacFarquhar among them—this eleventh edition features outstanding journalism from a wide variety of publications, providing a comprehensive overview of the year’s most compelling, relevant, and exciting developments in the world of science. Provocative and engaging, The Best American Science Writing 2010 reveals just how far science has brought us—and where it is headed next.


Product Details

  • Paperback: 368 pages
  • Publisher: Ecco (September 14, 2010)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0061852511
  • ISBN-13: 978-0061852510
  • Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #460,263 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Consistently Excellent Every Year October 10, 2010
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This book was predictably good. It should be - after all, it contains a select group (22) out of the many articles that had already passed the scrutiny of the series editor (that group sent to the annual guest editor used to be about a hundred). This year it is heavy on evolutionary sciences (good), on general issues (reasonable), and on psychological sciences (some not so impressive). I look forward to this book every year as well as its competitor, "Best Science and Nature Writing." The first three articles were found in both volumes - all three among my own favorites, as I marked by asterisks:

* "The Missions of Astronomy" by Steven Weinberg - Weinberg is a Nobel Prize winner and particle physics expert (currently at UT Austin) who decided he was not current in the history of science - so he decided to teach a course in it. This article looks to be adapted from one of his lectures. He starts out explaining how the ancients used the gnomon - similar to but not the same as a sundial. A gnomon is a vertical pole on a flat, level patch of ground open to the sun's rays. Daily charting of its shadow by Greeks led to "a discovery around 430 BC that was to trouble astronomers for two thousand years: the four seasons, whose beginnings and endings are precisely marked by the solstices and equinoxes, have slightly different lengths. This ruled out the possibility that the sun travels around the earth (or the earth travels around the sun) with constant velocity in a circle." It was not until the 17th century that Kepler explained that the earth's orbit is not a circle but an ellipse. A scientific reading of "Odyssey" reveals that Homer could accurately navigate by reading the stars and Weinberg explains how he did it. On a ship in the Mediterranean a sea captain explained to Weinberg how ship navigators used celestial methods until only recently - now replaced by GPS. The captain lamented that the younger captains don't know how to use a sextant and a chronometer.

But astronomy also experienced an overestimation of its usefulness. Much of the royal support for compiling tables of astronomical data in the medieval and early modern periods was motivated by widespread reliance on astrology. Many scientists, including Ptolemy and Newton were heavily into astrology. Weinberg closes by taking a swipe at NASA's wasteful program of manned spaceflight - cherished by NASA's funding and PR department but terribly cost-inefficient compared to unmanned projects. "All the satellites like Hubble or COBE or WMAP or Planck that have made possible the recent progress in cosmology have been unmanned."

* "A Life of its Own" by Michael Specter - "Scientists have been manipulating genes for decades - inserting, deleting, changing them in various microbes has become a routine function in thousands of labs." Now they are attempting to manufacture drugs and chemicals from entirely synthetic genes, analogous to a software creator rearranging loops of code for a new purpose. Artemisinin is key in treating malaria but the herb that creates it is difficult to produce by cultivation. Jay Keasling et al inserted genes from 3 organisms into E. coli with the idea of making it produce artemisinin. Within a decade his company figured out how to make the bacteria increase its production by a factor of a million, bring a course of treatment from $10 to $1. The scientific response has been reverential but Keasling is baffled by opposition to what should soon become the world's most reliable source of cheap artemisinin. Opposition comes from farmers of the herb and from the same groups that call genetically engineered food "Frankenfood."

Specter discusses the ethics of the era of biological engineering - peppered with suggestions that the E coli that makes a malarial drug could also make biofuels (substitute your favorite product). To be brought up to date on this subject, this fascinating article is hard to beat.

* "The Sixth Extinction" by Elizabeth Kolbert - Of the many species that have existed on earth over 99% have disappeared. There have been at least 20 mass extinctions on earth with 5 stand outs known as the "Big Five" - but extinction has been a contested concept. Until recently the view that "God created species fixed for all eternity" prevailed. Then in 1812 Frenchman Cuvier wrote an essay featuring the absence of mastodons, whose bones littered two continents, saying, "Life on this earth has often been disturbed by dreadful events....Innumerable living creatures have been victims of these catastrophes." The English edition included an introduction suggesting Cuvier's idea proved Noah's flood. Darwin embraced the idea of extinctions but didn't believe they were caused by catastrophes. Kolbert says, "Mass extinctions strike down the fit and the unfit at once...It takes millions of years for life to recover and when it does it generally has a new cast of characters...It is now generally agreed among biologists that another mass extinction is under way."

Extinctions of large mammals and birds have repeatedly happened shortly after the arrival of humans. This has happened in North America, South America, New Zealand, Australia, Madagascar, Hawaii, and many other locations. It happens as a result of hunting, burning, farming, logging, building, water diversion, atmospheric pollution - in general, habitat destruction. As Kolbert painstakingly demonstrated, it is now happening to frogs. They are dying of a fungus spread by doctors. A related fungus appears to be decimating the bat population.
Somewhere toward the end of the article, Kolbert tells the familiar story of the Yucatan peninsula meteor that killed off dinosaurs 65 million years ago. For this Sixth Extinction though. the perpetrator walks upright.

* "My Genome, My Self" by Steven Pinker - Pinker is the author of several well-known books including "Blank Slate," an investigation of the nature/nurture debate. He had the opportunity to have his genome sequenced as part of a research project and he presents his findings. "Apart from carrier screening, personal genomics will be more recreational than diagnostic for some time to come." This article contains a plethora of interesting facts about DNA, genetic testing, and how things work, and Pinker writes in a straightforward but entertaining style: "The reach of the gene gets stronger as we age, not weaker...we know what happens to people who get the worst news [on their genetic screens] - they handle it perfectly well...even in the simplest organisms, genes are not turned on and off like clockwork but are subject to a lot of random noise...the two traditional shapers of a person, nature and nurture, must be augmented by a third one, brute chance...for most traits, any influence of the genes will be probabilistic...It [personal genomics] opens up a niche for bottom-feeding companies to terrify hypochondriacs by turning dubious probabilities into Genes of Doom. Scientist have discovered a dozen genes which influence height but a person that has most of these genes can be only an inch taller than average. "Since height can be easily measured with a tape measure, what can we expect for more elusive traits like intelligence or personality."

Looking over what I have written looks negative about genomic testing - which I don't mean to be, nor does Pinker. Hopefully, I have included enough entertaining tidbits to perk your interest. This article is perfect for an up-to-date survey about nurture/nature, how genes work, and genetic testing - which should be refined exponentially in the coming decades.

* "The Deadly Choices At Memorial" by Sheri Fink - After Katrina, Memorial hospital was flooded, lost its power, then lost its emergency power. There were not enough helicopters to evacuate all the patients before they started dying - patients who already were deprived of necessary high tech support and the ability to deliver therapeutic drugs. Doctors and nurses began to label patients with 1, 2, or 3 pinned to their hospital gowns. The "1's" were transported first - they were the healthiest. The "3's" were not expected to get transport for various reasons - they were already DNR (do not resuscitate), they were to heavy to move down the stairwells from the 7th floor, or they were not expected to survive the move. Eventually, overworked and sleep-deprived caregivers decided to make some of them more comfortable with morphine and midazolam. As a result, doctors and nurses were accused of euthanasia and charged with murder. A sympathetic grand jury failed to indict them. This is a great story full of unresolved ethical disputes whose author won a Pulitzer prize for investigative reporting - not to be missed.

"Disaster Aversion" by Rivka Galchen" - About methods used, past and present to control the weather - hurricanes in particular. For someone who is very interested in getting to the science, this article distractingly went around the block several times, but it does cover the history and the science if you persevere.

* "The Kindest Cut" by Larrisa MacFarquhar - At a website called "MatchingDonors.com, you can find personal requests for a kidney donor from patients who are on dialysis and on the list. True to the old saying "no good deed goes unpunished" the author "explores the skepticism and suspicion - often from the medical establishment - that surrounds these seemingly altruistic donors." Either through MatchingDonors.com or through a hospital, about 600 have donated a kidney to a stranger. UNOS (United Network For Organ Sharing) is the organization usually responsible for organ allocation. They try to intimidate transplant centers into rejecting internet donors because MatchingDonor. Read more ›
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13 of 16 people found the following review helpful
This annual selection is generally a good bet. Series editor Jesse Cohen minimized his risk this year by prevailing on Jerome Groopman to serve as guest editor. Dr Groopman's own science writing will be familiar to readers of the New Yorker; he is also author of several best-selling books. For me, seeing his name on the cover of this anthology was an immediate guarantee of quality - I'm pleased to say that the collection lived up to my expectations.

In his excellent introduction Dr Groopman introduces the metaphor that the book might be thought of as a "symphony of science". It's not a particularly fortuitous choice of metaphor(one suspects it may have been forced on him by the series editor), but he struggles gamely with it to the bitter end. I prefer his introduction to a previous, similar, anthology in which he laid out his criteria for choosing what to include:

"the articles ... have novel and surprising arguments, protagonists who articulate their themes in clear, cogent voices, and vivid cinema. They are not verbose or tangential. They are filled with simple declarative sentences. ... I suspect none of the articles was easy to write. Each shows a depth of thought and reporting that takes time and considerable effort."

These are admirable criteria, indicating an editor who keeps the reader's welfare firmly in mind. And, with very few exceptions, the articles in the 2010 anthology satisfy them, so that the collection is accessible, thought-provoking and fun to read. I came away with the impression of a slight bias in favor of biomedical research; but this was only weakly confirmed upon closer inspection of the distribution of articles across categories. There was, however, a relatively narrow spectrum of sources for the roughly two dozen or so contributions:

New York Times : 5
New Yorker : 3
Science : 3
Salon.com : 2
Wired : 2

and one each from The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, Harper's, Discover, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Scientific American, and Science News.

This reliance on sources from what might be termed the "north-eastern establishment" prevented me from awarding a fifth star - one thing I look for in this kind of anthology is to be led to articles I might not otherwise come across, and on this criterion Dr Groopman let me down. But this sin of omission was a relatively minor disappointment, given the high quality of the articles that were included.

Some of the contributors are famous scientists(Steven Pinker "My Genome, My Self", Steven Weinberg "The Missions of Astronomy"), some are established science writers (Elizabeth Kolbert, Benedict Carey, David Dobbs), all contributors wrote clearly and engagingly, with just a couple of exceptions*.

My favorite articles were Elizabeth Kolbert's contribution about the link between climate change and the extinction of entire species and Sheri Fink's account of the agonizing triage choices that hospital staff faced after the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina. But there were at least a dozen other articles that were also strong contenders.

This is an excellent anthology, which I have no hesitation in recommending.

* : I read Daniel M. Wegner's "How to Think, Say, or Do Precisely the Worst Thing for Any Occasion" three times and found it as devoid of substance on the third reading as on the first. Jonah Lehrer's "The Truth about Grit" had the blindingly obvious message that perseverance is necessary to succeed in science, but took almost eight pages to make the point. I can't say I enjoyed his article - partly because of his overuse of the term "grit", and because he used it in ways God never intended. The sentence "a gritty person might occasionally eat too much chocolate cake, but they won't change careers every year", though intelligible, is ugly and distracting, as was the suggestion that a top priority for educators should be the quest for "grittier schools".
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Laymen's guide April 10, 2011
As a student, I've always been a big fan of scientific topics, though many of the things one learns in school do not quench the appetite for learning. Thankfully, books such as this one exist to allow for an extension of one's own knowledge about science without being too costly or too secular and specific. For us laymen, this book presents scientific topics that are relevant and advanced in terms that are extremely easy to understand, yet still scholarly. Some topics I didn't know existed, such as the science behind saying the wrong thing at the wrong time - other's I had heard about but never really learned about extensively, such as the placebo effect. This book does well in taking subjects one might have learned about in school and placing them in real world scenarios, expressing how they affect me, you, and the world around us.
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