Genre: Science

Review – How To Make A Vaccine

Posted February 10, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 3 Comments

Review – How To Make A Vaccine

How To Make a Vaccine

by John Rhodes

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 160
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Distinguished expert in vaccine development John Rhodes tells the story of the first approved COVID-19 vaccines and offers an essential, up-to-the-minute primer on how scientists discover, test, and distribute vaccines.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has affected every corner of the world, changing our relationship to our communities, to our jobs, and to each other, the most pressing question has been—when will it end? Researchers around the globe are urgently trying to answer this question by racing to test and distribute a vaccine that could end the greatest public health threat of our time. In How to Make a Vaccine, an expert who has firsthand experience developing vaccines tells an optimistic story of how three hundred years of vaccine discovery and a century and a half of immunology research have come together at this powerful moment—and will lead to multiple COVID-19 vaccines.

Dr. John Rhodes draws on his experience as an immunologist, including working alongside a young Anthony Fauci, to unravel the mystery of how vaccines are designed, tested, and produced at scale for global deployment. Concise and accessible, this book describes in everyday language how the immune system evolved to combat infection, how viruses responded by evolving ways to evade our defenses, and how vaccines do their work. That history, and the pace of current research developments, make Rhodes hopeful that multiple vaccines will protect us. Today the complex workings of the immune system are well understood. The tools needed by biomedical scientists stand ready to be used, and more than 160 vaccine candidates have already been produced. But defeating COVID-19 won’t be the end of the story: Rhodes describes how discoveries today are also empowering scientists to combat future threats to global health, including a recent breakthrough in the development of genetic vaccines, which have never before been used in humans.

As the world prepares for a vaccine, Rhodes offers a current and informative look at the science and strategies that deliver solutions to the crisis.

For a short book, John Rhodes’ How To Make a Vaccine is surprisingly in-depth. Motivated by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, Rhodes discusses how vaccines are manufactured, along with some of the history of vaccination and the cultural reaction to it. While most of this obviously isn’t new to me (as someone studying for my MSc in infectious diseases), his explanations are very clear.

I did find that after a while he got a little too in depth, towards the end of the book, discussing every single possible type of vaccine and adjuvant. For me, it got a little tedious because I know this stuff in slightly more depth… and I worry that for a layperson, it’s actually a bit too much depth. It’s hard for me to judge, though, as I haven’t been a layperson for a while now!

If you’re curious about the topic, and ready for some of the ins and outs of the regulatory proces, different types of vaccine and adjuvant, etc, I think this would be of interest, all the same.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Blue

Posted February 3, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment

Review – Blue

Blue: The Science and Secrets of Nature's Rarest Colour

by Kai Kupferschmidt

Genres: History, Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 224
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Blue is the most widely beloved color—but in nature, it’s the rarest hue of all. True, physics paints the sea and sky blue, but we can’t bottle this trick of the light. And blue pigment requires such complex chemistry that blue creatures, plants, and minerals are few indeed. Artists and kings have treasured blue dye like precious gold since the time of the pharoahs—and who today can help but marvel at a morpho butterfly in the rain forest or a blue jay at the window?

Science journalist Kai Kupferschmidt has been enraptured by blue since childhood. In his quest to understand the mysteries of his favorite color, he takes readers on a vivid journey—from a biotech lab in Japan and a volcanic lake in Oregon to his native Germany, home of the last blue-feathered Spix’s macaws. Deep underground where blue crystals grow, and miles overhead where astronauts gaze at our “blue marble” planet—wherever he finds this alluring color, it always has a story to tell.

Kai Kupferschmidt’s Blue is a book-length meditation on all things, well, you guessed it. It discuss blue as a pigment, blue as a historical and cultural thing, blue in linguistics, blue in plants, blue dye… you name it, it discusses it. Kupferschmidt is fascinated, and he’s sharing the journey, and along the way he explains some complex things very succinctly and clearly.

The book is also beautifully illustrated, all in colour, and has a section with further reading and sources, including image sources. All-in-all, beautifully presented and a joy to read — exactly the kind of curiosity I enjoy, zooming in on one subject and unravelling the things that touch it.

It’s shorter than it looks, given the illustrations and the full pages printed blue; I’d say it’s meant to be an object you enjoy looking at as much as anything else. I sped through it!

Rating: 4/5

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Review – A City on Mars

Posted January 30, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – A City on Mars

A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?

by Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 448
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Earth is not well. The promise of starting life anew somewhere far, far away—no climate change, no war, no Twitter—beckons, and settling the stars finally seems within our grasp. Or is it? Critically acclaimed, bestselling authors Kelly and Zach Weinersmith set out to write the essential guide to a glorious future of space settlements, but after years of research, they aren’t so sure it’s a good idea. Space technologies and space business are progressing fast, but we lack the knowledge needed to have space kids, build space farms, and create space nations in a way that doesn’t spark conflict back home. In a world hurtling toward human expansion into space, A City on Mars investigates whether the dream of new worlds won’t create nightmares, both for settlers and the people they leave behind. In the process, the Weinersmiths answer every question about space you’ve ever wondered about, and many you’ve never considered:

Can you make babies in space? Should corporations govern space settlements? What about space war? Are we headed for a housing crisis on the Moon’s Peaks of Eternal Light—and what happens if you’re left in the Craters of Eternal Darkness? Why do astronauts love taco sauce? Speaking of meals, what’s the legal status of space cannibalism?

With deep expertise, a winning sense of humor, and art from the beloved creator of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, the Weinersmiths investigate perhaps the biggest questions humanity will ever ask itself—whether and how to become multiplanetary.

Get in, we’re going to Mars.

Zach and Kelly Weinersmith cover a lot of information about the colonisation of Mars in this book, but they do so in a breezy, conversational way that makes it really easy to read. I found the whole thing fascinating, if a bit disheartening: somehow from popular culture you’d think we were really close to putting settlements on Mars, at least within the next decade or something, but the Weinersmiths make it clear we’re not there yet, for a bunch of reasons.

Those reasons can roughly speaking be broken up into categories: the things we don’t know about human bodies and how they’ll react to low or no-gravity situations, the technology we don’t yet have, the stuff we don’t yet know about Mars, and the legal framework that is currently ambiguous/contested/not likely to produce happy, harmonious space settlements.

The whole time I was reading, I couldn’t stop thinking about James S.A. Corey’s Expanse books, which wrestle with the aftermath of these issues in a fictionalised way: Belters are physically different to those born on Earth, the whole political structure (and the implosions thereof), the issue of childbirth, etc, etc.

Anyway, the Weinersmiths have solid reasonings for the things they assert, it all makes sense, it’s wonderfully readable for the layperson, and there are lots of illustrations which make it all a bit more fun along the way.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – The Science of Sin

Posted January 19, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 6 Comments

Review – The Science of Sin

The Science of Sin: Why we do the things we know we shouldn't

by Jack Lewis

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 304
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

It can often seem that we are utterly surrounded by temptation, from the ease of online shopping and the stream of targeted advertising encouraging us to greedily acquire yet more stuff, to the coffee, cake and fast-food shops that line our streets, beckoning us in to over-indulge on all the wrong things. It can feel like a constant battle to stay away from the temptations we know we shouldn't give in to. Where exactly do these urges come from? If we know we shouldn't do something, for the sake of our health, our pockets or our reputation, why is it often so very hard to do the right thing? Anyone who has ever wondered why they never seem to be able to stick to their diet, anyone to whom the world seems more vain and self-obsessed than ever, anyone who can't understand why love-cheats pursue their extra-marital affairs, anyone who struggles to resist the lure of the comfy sofa, or anyone who makes themselves bitter through endless comparison with other people - this book is for you.

The Science of Sin brings together the latest findings from neuroscience research to shed light on the universally fascinating subject of temptation - where it comes from, how to resist it and why we all tend to succumb from time to time. With each chapter inspired by one of the seven deadly sins, neurobiologist Jack Lewis illuminates the neural battles between temptation and restraint that take place within our brains, suggesting strategies to help us better manage our most troublesome impulses with the explicit goal of improving our health, our happiness and our productivity - helping us to say `no!' more often, especially when it really counts.

The Science of Sin takes on a lot of religious baggage, for all that Jack Lewis, its author, says that he’s an atheist. To some extent that’s inevitable given his background, and his choice to shape the book around the concept of the Seven Deadly Sins, looking for neurological and evolutionary explanations for the origins of each — both their pitfalls and their utility.

The problem is that it inevitably becomes very moralising. He does try to point out when certain neurological things might not be someone’s choice, but he seems to have more sympathy for paedophiles than for fat people, and is very certain that being fat is almost totally a choice people make (when in fact there are many contributing causes, including sheer poverty, where good food choices are not always available), and a moral one that impacts badly on society and on everyone around them. Fatness is also unequivocally bad for you, in Lewis’ view, where the real picture is more mixed (fat people, for instance, have lower 30-day mortality from bacterial pneumonia and have better survival rates and reduced immune depletion when living with HIV) and thinness is no guarantor of health of any kind.

(Important note: this is not something I’m interested in debating in the comments on this blog. I’ve studied some of the science of nutrition in relation to immunity as part of my MSc, but you’re best off heading to the literature with an open mind and a careful eye for bias — your own and that of the papers you find.)

In almost every chapter, he finds a way to reference narcissism, blame fat people, suggest fat people are narcissistic, and so on. And again, he treats these as moral issues, failures that people should rectify.

In some cases, he isn’t wrong, but he’s replacing religious moralising about it with a kind of secular moralising about it that sits badly with any effort to be objective. Combine that with his reliance on scans like fMRI to tell us about what’s going on in someone’s brain, and a lot of his conclusions are questionable: you can get apparently significant results from the brain of a dead salmon, with fMRI, an issue that he very briefly references before waving it away and saying that fMRI is the tool we have, so he’s going to use it.

For me, there was a kind of entertainment value in watching him build up his argument, but I was aware of the one-sided nature of his search for appropriate sources, and not appreciative of his moralising.

Rating: 2/5

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Review – Tickets for the Ark

Posted January 7, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Tickets for the Ark

Tickets for the Ark: From Wasps to Whales - How Do We Choose What to Save?

by Rebecca Nesbit

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 256
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Our planet hasn't seen the current rate of extinction since the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and global conservation efforts are failing to halt this. As a society, we face choices which will determine the fate of Earth's estimated 8.7 million species, including humans. As wildlife declines, conservation needs to make trade-offs. But what should we conserve and why?

Are we wrong to love bees and hate wasps? Are native species more valuable than newcomers (aka invasives)? Should some animals be culled to protect others, and what do we want the 'natural world' to look like? There are many surprising answers in Rebecca Nesbit's lively, stimulating book, which sows the seeds of a debate we urgently need to have.

Rebecca Nesbit’s Tickets for the Ark attempts to be somewhat nuanced about the topic of conservation, and to dig into why we want to save the creatures we want to save — and why we might want to save other animals instead. It’s not always obvious that we might want to save parasites, but we know little about some parasites, and little about what advantages they might offer taken as part of a whole ecosystem. Nesbit also talks about what we define as “wild” vs “domesticated”, how our responsibilities differ between the two, and how much responsibility we might want to or need to take for animals in rewilding projects.

That’s just a taster of the various dilemmas she serves up, but hopefully it gives an idea of the gist of the book. I appreciate that she recognises the potential role of animals that people don’t like — wasps, including parasitic wasps, and other ectoparasites like lice — and the issue that it’s very difficult to decide what counts as a “native” plant. All cut-offs are artificial, and do we really want to roll back time? Maybe we need a new normal?

None of it came as a surprise to me, since it’s a topic I’ve thought about a fair bit, but it’s an attempt at nuance in a world that sometimes lacks it, and I appreciated that. It was a slower read than I expected, but full of helpful context that can get a layperson properly interested and involved in the hypotheticals.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Dragons’ Teeth and Thunderstones

Posted January 6, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Review – Dragons’ Teeth and Thunderstones

Dragons' Teeth and Thunderstones: The Quest for the Meaning of Fossils

by Ken McNamara

Genres: History, Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 288
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

For at least half a million years, people have been doing some very strange things with fossils. Long before a few seventeenth-century minds started to decipher their true, organic nature, fossils had been eaten, dropped in goblets of wine, buried with the dead, and adorned bodies. What triggered such curious behavior was the belief that some fossils could cure illness, protect against being poisoned, ease the passage into the afterlife, ward off evil spirits, and even kill those who were just plain annoying. But above all, to our early prehistoric ancestors, fossils were the very stuff of artistic inspiration.

Drawing on archaeology, mythology, and folklore, Ken McNamara takes us on a journey through prehistory with these curious stones, and he explores humankind's unending quest for the meaning of fossils.

Ken McNamara’s Dragons’ Teeth and Thunderstones is basically a history of how people have related to and understood fossils, how they’ve used them and appreciated them, and the things we’ve believed about them. He discusses a lot of different superstitions, and bits of evidence about how ancient peoples thought about fossils; I’m not always convinced, particularly about the one where the dead five-armed starfish-like creature looks like a human, especially with a hole between its legs. Seems like wishful thinking to me.

In the end it’s an interesting survey, best when McNamara keeps his theories out of it (I’m not sure how wide the agreement is about things like “obviously that was viewed as a human”, but it doesn’t convince me anyway). It has some illustrations so you can see what he’s referring to, though they’re in black and white, so can be a little muddy.

Adrienne Mayor’s books might also be interesting to people who are tantalised by these ideas, particularly The First Fossil Hunters. McNamara spends a lot of time looking a bit further back in the past, beyond the point where we can refer to literature with our questions.

Rating: 2/5

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Review – Unwell Women

Posted December 20, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 3 Comments

Review – Unwell Women

Unwell Women: A Journey Through Medicine and Myth in a Man-Made World

by Elinor Cleghorn

Genres: History, Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 512
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Medicine carries the burden of its own troubling history. Over centuries, women's bodies have been demonised and demeaned until we feared them, felt ashamed of them, were humiliated by them. But as doctors, researchers, campaigners and most of all as patients, women have continuously challenged medical orthodoxy. Medicine's history has always been, and is still being, rewritten by women's resistance, strength and incredible courage.

In this ground-breaking history Elinor Cleghorn unpacks the roots of the perpetual misunderstanding, mystification and misdiagnosis of women's bodies, illness and pain. From the 'wandering womb' of ancient Greece to today's shifting understanding of hormones, menstruation and menopause, Unwell Women is the revolutionary story of women who have suffered, challenged and rewritten medical misogyny. Drawing on Elinor's own experience as an unwell woman, this is a powerful and timely exposé of the medical world and woman's place within it.

The health of female-bodied people has long been a thorny problem. Those in charge of medicine and health have so often been men, and the “default” or “correct” body has been thought to be male. I’m not just talking about in Victorian times or something — in modern times, medication has often only been tested on men, because women are inherently too variable and would throw off the results. (This makes a certain sense when you think about good experimental design, until you remember that the medication is supposed to work for women too, and will be given to them without further testing, so we really should actually know about the effects of the hormone cycle on it.)

Elinor Cleghorn’s book aims to discuss that history, to discuss the whys and wherefores and the impacts on women, not just now, but in the past, and not as something that’s necessarily getting better, but as something which still affects women now — including herself. It’s not just that women’s bodies are considered strange and different, but the experiences of female-bodied people about their own bodies haven’t been believed, and they haven’t been trusted to have any insight or understanding.

Obviously this book is a hard read in that way, chronicling a lot of mishaps and a lot of misogyny, some of it completely institutionalised. But it’s a useful one, if you want to take a good hard stare at it. None of it was too surprising for me, but that’s because I’ve gone out of my way to know this kind of thing; I know some folks for whom it would be revelatory. It’s certainly one place to start in understanding why the health of female-bodied people hasn’t been prioritised, and why that still affects people living now.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Rebel Cell

Posted December 16, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – Rebel Cell

Rebel Cell: Cancer, Evolution and the Science of Life

by Kay Arney

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 390
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Cancer has always been with us. It killed our hominid ancestors, the mammals they evolved from and the dinosaurs that trampled the ground before that. Tumours grow in pets, livestock and wild animals. Even tiny jelly-like Hydra, creatures that are little more than a tube full of water, can get cancer.

Paradoxically, many of us think of cancer as a contemporary killer, a disease of our own making caused by our modern lifestyles. But that's not true. Although it might be rare in many species, cancer is the enemy lurking within almost every living creature. Why? Because cancer is a bug in the system of life. We get cancer because we can't not get it. Cancer starts when cells revolt, throwing off their molecular shackles, and growing and dividing out of control in a shambolic mockery of normal life. This is why we can't avoid cancer: because the very genes that drive it are essential for life itself.

The revolution has raged, on and off, for millions of years. But it was only in the twentieth century that doctors and scientists made any significant progress in understanding and treating cancer, and it's only in the past few decades that we've finally begun to kick the mob's malignant arse. Now the game is changing. Scientists have infiltrated cancer's cellular rebellion and are finally learning its secrets. Geneticist and science writer Kat Arney takes the reader back to the dawn of life on planet earth right up to the present day to get to the heart of what cancer really is and how by better understanding it we might one day overcome it.

Cancer is a fascinating topic, but always a bit scary for me too: it’s a fine balance. Kat Arney’s Rebel Cell walks that line pretty well: she delves into a lot of very fascinating aspects of cancer, with one particular focus that I very much appreciated. Namely, that cancer is basically a microcosm of evolution, in a very similar way to microbes: with a short generation time, it can quickly respond to selective pressures and find ways around treatments.

That’s the terrifying part: it may be that some of our cancer treatments are barking way up the wrong tree, creating resistant cancers that have no known treatment. Arney also criticises the trend of super-individualised cancer treatment plans via genetic testing, pointing to the heterogeneity of cells in a cancer. Cancer isn’t any one thing, it’s a population of rapidly expanding cells which have lost a lot of the brakes that stop them mutating further and developing harmful quirks.

It’s not all gloom, because she does also note a few different options that might be worthwhile: treating cancer as a chronic disease and managing it carefully, allowing it to grow and shrink over time, without expecting to eradicate it — or using cocktails of drugs to hit multiple targets at once, or varying treatments when progress slows to try a new target.

There’s also some really fascinating stuff about contagious cancers (more common than you’d think), what looks quite like sexual reproduction between cancer cells, etc. It’s not a super quick read, but I was riveted.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – The Golden Mole

Posted December 14, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – The Golden Mole

The Golden Mole And Other Vanishing Treasure

by Katherine Rundell

Genres: Science
Pages: 208
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

In The Golden Mole, Katherine Rundell takes us on a globe-spanning tour of the world's strangest and most awe-inspiring animals, including pangolins, wombats, lemurs and seahorses.

But each of these animals is endangered. And so, this most passionately persuasive and sharply funny book is also an urgent, inspiring clarion call: to treasure and act - to save nature's vanishing wonders, before it is too late.

Katherine Rundell’s The Golden Mole gives us snapshot discussions of various rare creatures, often ones we don’t know much about, and which we’re in danger of losing due to the human impact on the world (climate change, habitat loss, hunting, etc). Each chapter is illustrated at the start with one image of the animal discussed, and takes up just a few pages — it’s a very lightweight taster session about the animals, rather than anything in depth.

Her anecdotes are often charming, and her enthusiasm for the animals is clear. In the end, I found it more tantalising than anything, as I love to read in-depth about all kinds of things, and no sooner would I get interested than the chapter would be over. Still, there are some fascinating mental images (I like the queue of hermit crabs holding claws, in size order, ready to climb into each others’ shells — though I think I knew about that already) and anecdotes, which mostly seem true enough when I check up on the sources.

In the end, it’s fun but very light. If you already know a lot about conservation and endangered animals, then perhaps it’s just a bit too frothy — but if you’re looking for some light reading with some curious “did you know” facts to share, it’d work. (Did you know that someone trained a capybara as a “guide dog”?)

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Dragon’s Blood and Willow Bark

Posted December 11, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Dragon’s Blood and Willow Bark

Dragon's Blood & Willow Bark: The Mysteries of Medieval Medicine

by Toni Mount

Genres: History, Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 303
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Calling to mind a time when butchers and executioners knew more about anatomy than university-trained physicians, the phrase ‘Medieval Medicine’ conjures up horrors for us with our modern ideas on hygiene, instant pain relief and effective treatments. Although no one could allay the dread of plague, the medical profession provided cosmetic procedures, women’s sanitary products, dietary advice and horoscopes predicting the sex of unborn babies or the best day to begin a journey.

Surgeons performed life-saving procedures, sometimes using anaesthetics, with post-operative antibiotic and antiseptic treatments to reduce the chances of infection. They knew a few tricks to lessen the scarring, too. Yet alongside such expertise, some still believed that unicorns, dragons and elephants supplied vital medical ingredients and the caladrius bird could diagnose recovery or death. This is the weird, wonderful and occasionally beneficial world of medieval medicine.

In her new book, popular historian Toni Mount guides the reader through this labyrinth of strange ideas and such unlikely remedies as leeches, meadowsweet, roasted cat and red bed curtains – some of which modern medicine is now coming to value – but without the nasty smells or any threat to personal wellbeing and safety.

This book by Toni Mount ends up being kind of a survey of what medieval medicine was like, discussing the principles underlying it, and the problems facing it; the kind of diseases, the kind of tools available, and the people who practised it. As such, it’s a bit broad-ranging, especially since “the medieval period” isn’t really one single monolithic block of time.

It works as a kind of survey, touching on what was believed about medicine, and discussing the things that actually worked. It doesn’t really go into the depth I’d like about that kind of thing, and ends up with a rushed kind of “and another thing” and “oh by the way” tone.

Still, an interesting enough read for what it is.

Rating: 3/5

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