Interested in cancer research? Here are the books to read:
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Siddhartha Mukherjee:
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Ok, that was an easy pick! After all Mukherjee was all over the news in the last year. But there is more:
Scientific B-sides
The flipside of the A-side: bonus after-hour ramblings on life, the universe and everything
Category Archives: Books
A philosophical suicide — Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending
“I don’t envy Adrian his death, but I envy him the clarity of his life,” says Tony Webster about his friend, who committed suicide when they were at university. Julian Barnes’ award-winning novel The Sense of an Ending explores the themes of history, memory and responsibility while bringing some clarity into Adrian’s death.
Tony, a man in his 60′s, looks back at his life: Four friends at school; a one-year relationship with Veronica at university; a humiliating visit to Veronica’s parents; a split-up; Veronica coming together with his best friend, Adrian; Adrian’s suicide in a bathtub — that’s the first half of The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes’ award-winning novel.
The story Tony tells about his life gets challenged in the second part, when it turns out that Adrian had kept a diary, which surprisingly was in the possession of Veronica’s mother until her death. In her will she passed it on to Tony, but Veronica is reluctant to hand it over. Tony’s efforts to get the diary from Veronica start the second part of the book and end in a complete reassessment of the initial story.
50th anniversary of Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Paradigm shift? Incommensurability? Did you ever wonder where these ideas came from? Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published 50 years ago and several texts online pay homage to this philosophical blockbuster.
Revitalizing labs with “artscience” — David Edwards: The Lab
In science, meticulousness and diligence trump creativity and imagination. At least that is how it’s often perceived: Scientific logic and order lead to Truth; imaginative creative chaos leads to something looking nice at best.
This dichomtomy is all wrong and obstructs innovation, argues The Lab by David Edwards, a Harvard professor with a vision of disciplinary cross-over:
“The fame she so richly deserves” — Rebecca Skloot: The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks
HeLa cells are everywhere: every biomedical research lab has samples and they are in the middle of current disucssions about how “the new cell biology” will look like.
Of course I had heard of them before, but before reading Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks I had never wondered where they came from. For example, I was suprised to learn that they were named after Henrietta Lacks, the woman they originated from:
Henrietta was a black woman born of slavery and share-cropping who fled north for prosperity, only to have her cells used as tools by white scientists without her consent. (…) It was also the story of cells from an uncredited black women becoming one of the most important tools in medicine. (p225)
And what a great story this is!
The Joy of Books
This is amazing! The whole book store comes alive!
| It’s not the first stop-motion video about books, but it’s quite a bigger effort than your regular “I got bored over the weekend and reorganized my bookshelf“-video. | |
Florian
“She ate Oscar!” – Nelson: a life in 54 graphic episodes
Imagine asking James Joyce, JRR Tolkien, Ernest Hemingway and 51 others to write about one day in a person’s life and then compile the results in a book. Stream-of-consciousness next to lean, economic prose next to elves – chances are high that the combined text would be an unreadable chimera.
But the same idea works brilliantly in a graphic novel, as Nelson from Blank Slate Books demonstrates:
Kent Haruf’s Plainsong
Kent Haruf’s Plainsong is an aptly named novel: a plain story in plain writing style. My copy contains a dedication by a previous owner: “Enjoy – the words of this novel ring true; always have told the children: ‘Life is what happens to you while you are making other plans!’” – which seems like a fitting description: Plainsong tells of the day-to-day struggle of everymen and -women living in Holt, Colorado, a ficticious town. There is no big conflict and no happy end – just plain life. The name and place and time don’t matter – Holt is a cipher for every Small Town, USA.
Geek love in its noblest form — Carl Zimmer’s Science Ink
You think crocheting mathematical objects is almost too geeky to bear? Then you might want to sit down now!
It all started when Carl Zimmer saw a friend’s tattoo of a DNA molecule and realized he had bumped into the tip of a vast hidden iceberg.
He soon started to collect pictures scientists sent him. It probably helped that he is a rather well-known science writer for papers like the New York Times and magazines such as Discover; if I’d asked people for pictures of their body they’d have sued me for harrassment.
So far Carl has amassed more than 250 tattoos on his blog The Loom. If you ever feel the need to procrastinate, this collection is a great way to spend time.
And it gets even better. Now a selection of his collection got published as a book — Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed.
In November 2011 Science Ink even made the #2 spot in the Amazon best seller lists for … Beauty and Fashion!
That makes me hope to see a new trend emerging here. I’d prefer to see more DNA tattoos than those ubiquitous tramp stamps.
Science Ink is on my Christmas wishlist. Let’s hope Nicola James reads this …
Florian
We steady ourselves with the past — Lauren Groff: The Monsters of Templeton
Hey, it’s that beast from Learning GNU Emacs, but what is it doing here? I found it’s flipped twin in the background of Lauren Groff‘s webpage. Her designer seems to be inspired by O’Reilly book covers – every single page features an animal I associate with computer programming.
Anyhow, enough of the geeky stuff. Why was I on Groff’s webpage anyway?
Obsessive-compulsiveness at its best — Ursus Wehrli’s art of tidying up
How to explain abstract scientific concepts? Ideally in a fun, engaging way with a clear punch-line and message that people find easy to carry home with them.
“Anthropomorphism of a disease” — Emperor of All Maladies wins Guardian Book award
The Emperor of All Maladies, a biography of cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee, just won the Guardian First Book award! First the Pulitzer, now this – not bad at all for a science book.
Crocheting reality – beautiful fringe science
“For thousands of years mathematicians believed there were just 2 types of geometry, the plane and the sphere. But another more aberrant structure lurks beneath the surface of Euclid’s laws – one that has been illuminated through the art of crochet.” *
You’ve heard correctly: crochet!
The Institute for Figuring features many ways to make abstract topics more accessible, one of them is to crochet models of hyperbolic spaces. A whole institute dedicated to aesthetic dimensions of science and mathematics — this is awesome!
Téa Obreht: The Tiger’s Wife
Creative writing courses can be controversial: ‘institutionalized creativity’–doesn’t that sound like an oxymoron? And what about the standardised fiction they write in these courses: isn’t that technically smooth, but stone cold dead? Well, then The Tiger’s Wife might come as a big surprise!
The book of life and its history
Being so busy beating cancer one technical paper at a time, I often don’t get the opportunity to step back and see how our stuff relates to what other people are doing in foreign territories … like the humanities. So I was thrilled to be invited to team up with Barbara Zipser, a researcher in the history of medicine at RHUL. In a chapter in her forthcoming book we contrast stemmatics and textual criticism in philology with phylogenetic methods in biology. The following fragment is part of my bit of the bargain. Enjoy!
Unlike physics, biology does not have a strong mathematical theory to explain and predict observed phenomena. This may be one of the reasons why biology is so rich in metaphors. The Tree of Life connects all forms of life on earth. Conrad Waddington famously compared the development of cell types and tissues to marbles rolling down a grooved slope, the so called epigenetic landscape. And inside every single cell the nucleus contains an organism’s genome, the Book of Life written in the language of DNA. Similar to a text written in a human language, DNA transfers information, it can be transcribed into a different form (RNA instead of DNA) and it can be translated (into proteins).
The idea that the genome can be read and edited pervades all molecular biology and forms one of the most powerful and suggestive metaphors of modern science.
