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Death and Other Options: How To Think (Hopefully!) About Global Health

What’s Killing Us:  A Practica Guide to Understanding Our Biggest Global Health Problems by Alanna Shaikh. TED Books 2012, Kindle, iBookstore, Nook

Reviewed by Tom Levenson

The last decade of the seventeenth century was a great age for London’s media junkies. Paper had become cheap enough to permit the emergence of the first  real newspapers in the English-speaking world.  The censors saw their reign end in 1696, the year after Parliament declined to renew the Licensing Act. With that, printers no longer had to fear harsh penalties for operating an unapproved press.  Free lance journalism was emerging as a plausible way to make a sort of a living – even if one of its most prominent practitioners, Daniel Dafoe, did do his stint in debtor’s prison.

Given all that, it’s no surprise that a torrent of what we may call new media poured forth. If you had something to say and even quite modest means, you could say it – and plenty did. Readers could lay their hands on learned disputes on the question of singing in church; coiners advising the government on the best methods to prevent counterfeiting; at least one poem by a law student on the subject of long vacations.

All of these appeared in the form that truly came into its own in the 17^th century. That would be the pamphlet: a modest tract, easier to write, cheaper to print, swifter to plow through than any scholar’s tome…

…All of which is to say that there is nothing new under the sun.

Flash forward roughly three hundred years, and lay your digital mitts on the subject of this review, Alanna Shaikh’s What’s Killing Us.  It is an e-bite of an argument, less than forty pages to cover Shaikh’s top-ten list of global health problems.  It is a pamphlet by any other name, and hence an example of one of my favorite everything-old-is-new-again gifts of the digital revolution. 

One note before getting to the meat of Shaik’s work. Sharp-eyed readers will see that I’ve left unmentioned one property of What’s Killing Us.  It’s a TED book, and TEDity has come in for its lumps here. This one doesn’t, or shouldn’t, in part because it does not attempt to reduce the difficult reality of global health to a trademarked Big Idea.  Instead, it is an example of what TED promises but does not always deliver – a guide to thinking about a the complexity of an issue that enables – really demands that -- the reader join in figuring out what the hell to do.

Deep Water: A Pretty Good TED Ebook (Really!) About Climate Change

Deep Water: As Polar Ice Melts, Scientists Debate How High Our Oceans Will Rise, by Daniel Grossman. TED 2012. TED App for iPhone/iPad, Kindle, Nook. Book web site

[Editor's note: John Dupuis, the author of this review, is the Acting Associate University Librarian at York University in Toronto. He's joined me and other Download the Universe editors on several panels about science ebooks, and he's tempered our optimism with thoughtful skepticism about how ebooks can add to civilization's body of knowledge. (What happens when no one makes Kindles anymore?) Recently, Dupuis wrote about a new ebook from TED on his own blog, Confessions of A Science Librarian. I asked him if he could write an expanded version for Download the Universe.--Carl Zimmer]

Guest review by John Dupuis

I feel a little weird reviewing this book. It's a TED book, you see. What's a TED book, you ask? I'll let TED tell you:

Shorter than a novel, but longer than an magazine article--a TED Book is a great way to feed your craving for ideas anytime. TED Books are short original electronic books produced every two weeks by TED Conferences. Like the best TEDTalks, they're personal and provocative, and designed to spread great ideas. TED Books are typically under 20,000 words--long enough to unleash a powerful narrative, but short enough to be read in a single sitting.

They're like TED talks, in other words, but they provide longer, more in-depth treatment than is possible in a short talk. On the surface, that's a really great idea. In practice, it can be a bit problematic--just like TED talks.

Carl Zimmer and Evgeny Morozov have gone into fairly extensive detail about the dark side of TED talks and TED books. Basically, the format encourages a kind of hip superficiality and fame-mongering. Ideas want to be famous, to paraphrase the famous saying that information wants to be free. In fact, ideas should be deep and well thought-out. And, you know, even perhaps a little on the valid side, too.

Which brings me to this particular TED book: Daniel Grossman's Deep Water. Here's how TED describes it:

As global warming continues, the massive ice caps at Earth’s poles are melting at an increasingly alarming rate. Water once safely anchored in glacial ice is surging into the sea. The flow could become a deluge, and millions of people living near coastlines are in danger. Inundation could impact every nation on earth. But scientists don’t yet know how fast this polar ice will melt, or how high our seas could rise. In an effort to find out, a team of renowned and quirky geologists takes a 4,000-mile road trip across Western Australia. They collect fossils and rocks from ancient shorelines and accumulate new evidence that ancient sea levels were frighteningly high during epochs when average global temperatures were barely higher than today. In Deep Water veteran environmental journalist, radio producer and documentary filmmaker Daniel Grossman explores the new and fascinating science — and scientists — of sea-level rise. His investigation turns up both startling and worrisome evidence that humans are upsetting a delicate natural equilibrium. If knocked off balance, it could hastily melt the planet’s ice and send sea levels soaring.

Interplanetary Cuisine

Space Nutrition, by Scott M. Smith, Janis Davis-Street, Lisa Neasbitt & Sara R. Zwart. Published by NASA Nutritional Biochemistry Laboratory. iPad (iBooks 2 and iOS5 required), free.

Reviewed by Veronique Greenwood

A couple of months ago, I attended a trade show for the processed food industry. There, wandering among booths hawking hydrolyzed vegetable protein, phosphate, and guar gum, I learned that despite its implication in the obesity epidemic, the processed food industry views itself as a direct descendant of Louis Pasteur and his pasteurization process—a provider of safe food for millions. This was profoundly unsettling, and I was relieved when I happened across a pair of NASA food scientists standing before a poster. In space, how food is preserved and packaged isn’t a matter of merchandizing. It is still, as in the days of Pasteur, a matter of survival.

This thesis and the science you need to know to understand it are presented in Space Nutrition, a free ebook put together by members of NASA’s Nutritional Biochemistry Laboratory. Though it makes extremely limited use of multimedia (warning: it only functions in the landscape orientation), Space Nutrition is a passable introduction to the special difficulties of getting a balanced diet in space, where bone loss is a given, nutrients are absorbed differently than on Earth, and everything must have a long shelf life. Perhaps more importantly, it's a window into the enthusiasms and curiosity of the scientists who wrote it.

The book, which is pitched at children grades 5-8, grew out of a long-running space nutrition newsletter [pdf], and this heritage may be responsible for its poor organization. There are sections, for example, called “Space Food” and “Space Flight Research” in the chapter called Nutrition, but the chapter called Space Flight Nutrition has only one section, entitled “Being Healthy is not Just About Nutrition (even though we like to think it is!)” (caps theirs). Frustratingly, the details of how space flight affects the human body and the nutrients in food are never enumerated in one place. This hampers its usefulness as a primer.

But for me, and I suspect for any kids reading it, the book's primary charm is in the photographs and asides that you can’t find in a Wikipedia article on the subject. One photogallery is full of snapshots taken by excited Nutritional Biochemistry Lab members as they drive to Kennedy Space Center to pick up astronaut blood samples from the ISS, which they use to determine the effects of space flight on nutrient absorption, bones, and muscles. The shots of the Experiment Payload truck that retrieves the samples and of the little blue NASA duffel bags they are carried home in give the process of space research a refreshing physicality.

And spaceflight seen from a food scientist's point of view is endearingly kooky. Crumbs are a big no-no for space foods—they fly around and clog the instruments. Tortillas that last almost a year, on the other hand, are a very exciting development, the authors write, because you would need three hands to make a traditional sandwich with two slices of bread and a slice of baloney in space. The book's history of manned spaceflight missions reads like no other you'll find. Gemini: Shrimp cocktail, chicken and vegetables, pudding, applesauce. Apollo: bread slices, cheddar cheese spread, frankfurters, fruit juice. Skylab: steak, vanilla ice cream.

These colorful details, at least for me, don't quite make up for the organizational problems. But the book is free, and if you or your kid are interested in space flight or astronaut food, it's certainly worth downloading.

The book also raises the hope, however faint, that perhaps someday we will seek to turn the considerable power of food science not towards making potato chips fly off the shelves, or devising yet more uses for soy protein, but towards getting humans on other planets.

Veronique Greenwood is a staff writer at DISCOVER Magazine. She writes about everything from caffeine chemistry to cold cures to Jelly Belly flavors, and her work has appeared in Scientific American, TIME.com, TheAtlantic.com, and others. Follow her on Twitter here.

The New Republic gets Download-The-Universe-ish!

Here at Download the Universe, we're pleased to see a venerable publication like the New Republic give some attention to science ebooks--in the August 23 print edition, no less. In "The Naked and the TED," Evgeny Morozov takes a look at three ebooks published by TED. His harsh verdict is a lot like our reviews of a couple TED titles (me on The Demise of Guys, David Dobbs on Smile). He even refers to my review in the piece--although he doesn't actually mention Download the Universe, a shout-out that would have been most appreciated. 

Morozov's main object of scorn is a TED ebook called Hybrid Reality. I can see why. It's one of those utopian manifestos promising solutions to all our woes--political, social, medical, and so on--through advances in technology. Attacking a book like Hybrid Reality is not a big jump for Morozov--he writes frequently about the hidden threats to democracy posed by the Internet.

Morozov's writing has one main mode--the snarky attack. It works just fine when he's going after smiley-faced privacy-assassins like Facebook. But Hybrid Reality doesn't just invoke the Internet to promise us a better tomorrow. It also pledges that the Human Genome Project, neuroscience, and other branches of science will provide cures for what ails us. And since Morozov loathes the authors of Hybrid Reality, he stands ready to belittle whatever they like. If they like the Human Genome Project, for example, then it must be bogus. "The Human Genome Project," Morozov declares, "for all the hype it generated a decade ago, has not accomplished much."

What ruler is Morozov using to measure the project's accomplishments? He doesn't tell us, so we'll have to guess. If he relied solely on breathless news articles in the late 1990s and thought we'd have a cure for every disease known to man in under ten years, then I can see why he's disappointed. 

But if Morozov had done the right thing and had looked at the actual scientific impacts of the Human Genome Project, he'd see that scientists have indeed accomplished much. Thanks to the Human Genome Project, scientists have discovered a previously unknown lineage of extinct humans in Siberia. As I wrote last month in the New York Times, scientists are gaining a new appreciation of the role that microbes play in our bodies--an appreciation only possible because scientists sequencing the human genome figured out how to assemble complete genomes from broken pieces. By sequencing the entire genomes of patients, scientists can pinpoint the mutations responsible for genetic diseases. That's just the start of a very long list. (And let's not forget the $141 in economic benefit for every $1 of government investment in the Human Genome Project.) 

Morozov's dismissal of results like these is just as glib as the techno-utopianism that he attacks. 

Because Morozov is perpetually on the attack, I have no idea if he really thinks that the Human Genome Project is yet another bogus technological fix. Does he think that genome research can't possibly solve any problems? More broadly, I wonder what Morozov thinks is the proper place of technology and science in society. If I've missed this in Morozov's writings, I'd be happy for someone to point it out to me.

Like the Human Genome Project, ebooks are guilty by association--or at least ones published by TED: 

When they launched their publishing venture, the TED organizers dismissed any concern that their books’ slim size would be dumbing us down. “Actually, we suspect people reading TED Books will be trading up rather than down. They’ll be reading a short, compelling book instead of browsing a magazine or doing crossword puzzles. Our goal is to make ideas accessible in a way that matches modern attention spans.” But surely “modern attention spans” must be resisted, not celebrated. Brevity may be the soul of wit, or of lingerie, but it is not the soul of analysis. The TED ideal of thought is the ideal of the “takeaway”—the shrinkage of thought for people too busy to think. I don’t know if the crossword puzzles are rewiring our brains—I hope TED knows its neuroscience, with all the neuroscientists on its stage—but anyone who is seriously considering reading Hybrid Reality or Smile should also entertain the option of playing Angry Birds or Fruit Ninja.

This is fun to read, but it raises questions that it can't answer. Are ebooks by their nature corrupting? Or does Morozov only object to ebooks that are produced by one organization that he doesn't like? Here at Download the Universe, we don't flinch from calling garbage what it is. But we also find ebooks that delight us. Is such a thing even possible in Morozov's moral universe? I know for a fact that Morozov reads Download the Universe, and so let me end with four words: Our comment thread awaits.

--Carl Zimmer