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The Long Quest to Catch a Poisoner

The Kalinka Affair: A Father’s Hunt for His Daughter’s Killer, by Joshua Hammer,  published by The Atavist for Kindle, iPad, Nook, Google Play, and Kobo.

Reviewed by Deborah Blum

Call it an identity crisis of sorts. But for a career science writer, I’ve found myself spending an unusual amount of time in the past few years writing – and devotedly reading – true crime stories.

Call it also a logical consequence. I wrote a book about poison, murder and the early days of forensic toxicology. I write a blog about culture and chemistry, one that leads me inevitably into stories of lethal cocktails and homicidal intent. When I see a tale of murder and mystery, I usually wonder if there was a toxic weapon involved.

I realize that telling you this may make me sound a little creepy and it’s not – promise – that I spend my days lurking around hoping for a homicide.  But I do look for stories that allow me to practice what I occasionally think of as subversive chemistry writing, narratives in which I can weave some toxicology, sneak a few chemical formulas or Periodic Table references into the tale.

There’s more at play here, though, than my interest in narrative story telling techniques.  Forensic toxicology raises some fascinating questions about the role of scientific detective work. Can good chemistry always solve a murder? Even if we find a poison in a body, does that always lead us to the killer? And even if we know the killer, does that always lead us to justice?

Which brings me, of course, to The Atavist’s recent successful true crime single, The Kalinka Affair.  The story is written by Joshua Hammer, a former foreign bureau chief for Newsweek, and a man with a long-time fascination with murder himself. His full-length books include Murder in Yosemite (the story of a 1999 mass murder in the national park), Sherlock Holmes’ London, and Where Agatha Christie Dreamed Up Murder.

You’ve probably guessed by now that The Kalinka Affair involves poison and murder. That’s my focus more than the author’s – this is foremost a story of a father’s full-fanatic drive to find justice in the matter of his daughter’s death. That passionate, guilt-and-love driven parental determination drives the narrative forward through almost 30 years of twists and turns, international politics and criminal undertakings, and unforgiving rage. “Bamberski would leave his job, burn through much of his life savings, and devote thousands of hours to pursuing his quarry,” Hammer writes.

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 Science of Sports: An eBook Goes for the Gold, Gets A Bronze

The Science of Sports: Winning in the Olympics. Scientific American $3.99   Kindle, iBook, Nook,  Sony Reader

Guest review by Jaime Green

I love the Olympics, although I'm not sure why. Maybe it's the special-occasion feel, or the every-two-years anticipation--a longer wait than for next Christmas. (I do remember when both summer and winter games were held in the same year, though not well enough to recall whether the four-year wait heightened the thrill or if the crush of excitement was too much, gymnastics and archery only six months from figure luge and ski jump.)

The exotic sports at the Olympics also add to its thrill. Sure, people will snark about the two weeks a year we care about synchronized diving --“Where were you during world championships last year!?”--but for those two weeks we do care! We cram our brains with obscure knowledge. Every four winters we learn about triple axels and the salchow--how the heck to spell salchow--and then we let it all go dormant for the next four years, until we can debate the finer points of fencing again.

It's this thrill of the unusual, and of learning its finer points, that I was looking for in Scientific American's ebook, The Science of Sports: Winning in the Olympics. And coming into it looking for that angle, I was disappointed that the book stayed so true to the first part of its title: the science of sports. That's what this ebook is full of. What it is not full of, and what I missed, was the science of the Olympics.

This first ebook from the editors of Scientific American reads much more like a collection of articles than a single work, and as such it is a perfectly serviceable survey on the science of sports. Pieces are divided into eight sections: The Psychology of Winning, Pushing Human Limits, Drugs and Doping, Concussions, Comeback from Injury, Gear that Gives an Edge, Fitness: Expert Advice for You, and Closing Ceremonies. The pieces, written especially for this ebook by individual Scientific American editors and contributors, explore the physiology, biochemistry, and neurobiology of sports. They also examine recent incidents, such as doping scandals, that bring science and sports together in less savory ways.

Although the lack of unity was sometimes frustrating on a straight-through read--back-to-back articles sometimes retread each other's ground, re-explaining a concept or re-defining a blood protein--it still makes for a nice collection to pick your way through. There's no need to read in order, so you can follow your interests, from the mental acuity of an elite athlete to the most common Olympic injuries and then over to how playing sports can boost children's brain power. You'll learn something cool whichever path you take. And there's a lot to learn. Even if you didn't need this ebook to teach you that the ACL isn't the Achilles tendon but is actually in the knee, there is satisfyingly deep discussion of topics ranging from psychology to blood doping to the physics of prosthetic legs.

The questions tackled in this ebook go beyond the science of sports, too, in several cases engaging with the ethical questions that scientific advances raise. Do steroids make better athletes, or do they make cheaters? How many restrictions should be put on young athletes to protect their brains from concussions? Where does an athlete find the balance between improved performance and dangerously low body fat? These questions make interesting food for thought, and perhaps also foundations for important decisions. The ramifications extend far beyond the Olympic arenas.

Yet I still wished this ebook spent more time within those Olympic arenas. Many pieces focus surprisingly squarely on the topic of the ebook's subtitle: winning. It's as if the ebook's authors decided that Olympic equals elite, and then just wrote about how elite athletes win. But I don't care if Michael Phelps gets the gold. I care that he is stunning to watch. (In the pool, I mean.) And I want to know the science behind his performance--of something that feels specifically, uniquely Olympic. Articles that focused on baseball and American football felt similarly dissatisfying. They're sports, yes, but hardly what we think of as Olympic sports. (In fact, now that baseball's been dropped from the games, neither is an Olympic sport.) For readers drawn to this ebook for the Olympics and not for the sports, this may be a disappointment.

Also potentially disappointing--or virulently frustrating, depending on your level of investment--are some gaps in the scientific and athletic arguments. Jesse Bering's piece, “Why We Love Sports: Success of the Fittest,” proposes that sports compel us as fans and spectators because they serve as a demonstration of reproductive prowess. (Think of football as the peacock tail-feathers of our species.) This argument itself is a stretch. Sports audiences are so dramatically weighted toward men who are not looking to the field for mates. Bering doesn't even give the plausible counterarguments lip service. What about the primal need for play? Tribal affiliations and the strengthening power of us vs. them? The evolution and ritualization of hunting and combat practice? Heck, maybe even mirror neurons, who knows?

In a piece called “Does Exercise Really Make You Stronger?” Coco Ballantyne asserts that “the longer, harder and more often you exercise, the greater the health benefits.” She fails to offer the important caveat against overtraining, which plagues professional and devoted amateur athletes alike, with increased risk of injuries and often dramatic negative effects from overstressing the body. An article on preventing shin splints was similarly narrow-sighted, failing to mention the calf-strengthening exercises that have saved the shins of every new runner I know. 

The highlights of the book examined the subjects that I, and most readers, have no experience with. The articles on top-level cyclists and swimmers, on Olympic runner Oscar Pistorious' prosthetic legs, drew me in much more and carried that charge of the slightly esoteric that make me love the Olympics. Even an article on advanced swim gear brought a little frisson of elite, advanced technology. And “Who Wins the 40-Yard Dash: Squirrel, Elephant, Pig, Human?” armed me for some fun small-talk to fill the breaks between track and field events over the next two weeks.

For the most part, though, the science here is decidedly pedestrian. Readers who want to learn about the geometry of a rhythmic gymnast's twirling ribbon or how a pentathlete slows her heart rate before she shoots will have to wait. Maybe there will be something for us in another four years.

 

Jaime Green is a graduate student in Columbia's MFA writing program. Her work has appeared in The Awl, Spezzatino, The Hairpin, and Parabasis. She is writing a book about the possibility of life in the universe.

Rudy Rucker Resurrects a Lost Classic of Psychedelia

Be Not Content: A Subterranean Journal, by William J. Craddock. Originally published in 1970 by Doubleday. Reprinted in 2011 by Transreal Books. Available for Kindle and NOOK from publisher Rudy Rucker, $6, or in paperback from Amazon, $16.

Reviewed by Steve Silberman

A Place You'll Never See

In the late 1960s, my family lived in a middle-class housing development in New York City called Fresh Meadows. An attempt to build a suburban-style utopia in the middle of Queens for returning World War 2 veterans, it was a cheerful place to grow up, with lots of trees, playgrounds linked by winding paths, and a grassy slope behind our apartment complex that was perfect for sledding in the winter. It was on that hill, one day in 1968 or so, that I met a group of refugees from another brave attempt to construct utopia in the midst of an American city.

It was a strange time to be a kid. Every night the sober, gray-faced men on TV issued dispatches from the ongoing apocalypse: liquid fire raining from the sky onto huts in Vietnam; mobs of police charging into crowds of college students, clubs flailing; flags torched, ghettos ablaze, and an actual pig running for President. Meanwhile, when my mother and father took me and my sister to Central Park on Sundays, Bethesda fountain was filled with longhaired men and women splashing around naked. I decided that when I grew up, I wanted to be like them. I turned my room into a little shrine of freakdom lit by candles weeping rainbow tears down the straw sides of chianti bottles.

In that context where anything at all might happen, it didn't seem unusual to walk behind our building on 69^th Avenue one day and find a group of older kids lying on a blanket, limbs intertwined, gazing up at the clouds and giggling occasionally between lengthy intervals of silence. Always curious, I walked right up and started asking questions. They were very friendly, and invited me to join them in playful activities like cutting leaves out of paper and hanging them in the trees. Every now and then, one of them would utter a cryptic remark along the lines of, "Should we drop another tab of blue or wait?" Even at age nine, I was savvy enough to realize that they were talking about something illegal, probably drugs. It didn't matter. The sly elves that had mysteriously appeared in my backyard were obviously harmless, and I wasn't surprised when I walked out the next morning and found them still camping out beside the basketball court.

After another day of soaking up the ambience of their psychedelic idyll, I invited them upstairs to meet my parents. This wasn't as foolish as it appears: my parents were anti-war radicals, albeit of the academic, buttoned-down, cigarette-smoking, Marx-and-Engels-quoting, Mao's little-red-book-reading, New Leftist type; but I hoped everyone might see eye-to-eye on the coming revolution. I don't remember how my parents reacted to my new pals from the backyard, but all seemed to go well. And I'll never forget what one young woman in the group said to me, right before they were sucked back into the space-time continuum, when I asked them where they came from: "We're from a place you'll never see -- the Haight-Ashbury."

O the patchouli-scented portents, O the irony! Because, dear reader, I have now been a resident of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco for 33 years -- a fact I definitely attribute to my chance meeting in Fresh Meadows with those echt hippies. But in truth, the nice lady in the purple paisley schmatte was right on. As it has been since I moved here, Haight Street is a tie-dyed dump, a dreadlocked tourist trap lined with sleazy smoke shops and prep-school refuseniks on the road to rehab under macabre murals of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix -- hardly the shining New Jerusalem that the first-generation hippies hoped to build here in the belly of the beast.

As it turns out, even seeing the Haight-Ashbury of that era through the borrowed eyes of eyewitnesses and historians has been difficult. The Paradise Now! aesthetic of the lysergic lotus-eaters didn't lend itself to careful chronicling and recollections in sober tranquility, as anyone who has tried to sit through the cosmically tedious home movies of the Merry Pranksters sloshing in the mud can attest. Ironically, a book that was thought to be insufferably square by anyone who appeared in its pages -- Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, published in 1968 -- has stood virtually unchallenged as the most vivid literary representation of the era, with its hurtling descriptions of the young Grateful Dead in full fury at Ken Kesey's multimedia clusterfucks, shining in the chaotic din "like a light-bulb in a womb."

Few certifiably clued-in alumni of that scene, it seems, were left with enough cognitive fortitude to compile the definitive tale of the tribe. Charles Perry's The Haight-Ashbury: A History is a dutifully researched, workmanlike account of events, but it lacks the bravado and flash that gave the era its lasting mythological dimension. Before ODing on a New York subway, Emmett Grogan, the swashbuckling founder of the Diggers -- the prototypical commune that kept the pilgrim hordes fed with dumpster-dive cuisine until the Mafia, speed, and busloads of free-love rubberneckers trampled down flower power for good -- wrote a memoir of the Haight called Ringolevio that had an appealing hip swagger, but never quite rose to the level of great art, as Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and Jack Kerouac's On the Road had done for the previous Beat generation of seekers.

Now, however, another title has been added to the very short list of engaging books about the golden age of neuro-hacking, when a bunch of scruffy street kids laid claim to the most potent "mind-manifesting" molecules in history, and used them to storm the synaptic gates of Heaven. First published in 1970 and long out of print, moldering on a few select dusty bookshelves beside copies of A Separate Reality, Das Energi, and The Whole Earth Catalog, William Craddock's Be Not Content is now back as an ebook and limited-edition paperback, snatched out of the memory hole by Rudy Rucker, the computer scientist and mathematician who helped launch the cyberpunk genre of fiction with his Ware tetralogy and "transrealist" novels like White Light.

Ballsy, redemptively honest, astonishingly inventive, flawed, and ultimately heartbreaking, Be Not Content made a significant impact on the handful of freaks who read it, including Rucker himself, who writes on his website, "I quickly began to idolize Craddock. I had my own memories of the psychedelic revolution, and when reading Be Not Content I felt -- Yes. This is the way it was. This guy got it right." Rucker's act of digital resurrection also represents another appealing potential for the ebook format: the revival of obscure, obsolete titles by readers obsessed enough to secure the reprint rights.

Science by Candlelight

The Chemical History of a Candle, by Michael Faraday, (Griffin, Bohn And Co., London, 1861), available free from Project Gutenberg in multiple e-reader formats and also from LibriVox as a free audiobook.

reviewed by Deborah Blum

 "There is no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle."

 

It was the above line that first caught my attention. The recognition that we often best appreciate our extraordinary natural world by seeing it through the lens of the ordinary: crystalline structure as revealed by the stitchery of winter frost, the chemical dance of light and life found in the changing colors of leaves, the hot whisper of oxygen as it sends the flame higher.

That recognition has driven much of my own science writing – the idea that we can often illuminate science through tales of the everyday.  I wish I could tell you that I'd thought of it first, that it was somehow primordially my own.  But, at best, I think I can claim to be carrying on a time-honored tradition. Because it's very clear that the 19th century scientist Michael Faraday was doing that and doing it exceptionally well some 150 years ago.

Here at Download the Universe, we reviewers are mostly looking toward the future - what we hope is the promise of e-books, their potential to transform the reading experience. Possibly transcend it. But I want to take this opportunity to explore another aspect of the electronic publishing world, the ability to explore our past, the free archives offered by publishers like Project Gutenberg. 

Founded in 1971 by the late Michael Hart, Project Gutenberg began as a labor of love, the painstaking transfer of books in the public domain - many of them once forgotten-- into digital life. The Gutenberg website now makes 39,000 free e-books available. It also links with digital partners to provide access to another 60,000 e-manuscripts. Like Faraday's candle--to stretch that analogy a little here -  it offers an open door, a brightly lit access to the words, and even the wisdom, of our past.  Like no other generation, we can explore this virtual library,  stumble across old chemical histories of candles and learn to think differently about our own work.

And stumble is exactly what I did.

I see you are not tired of the candle yet, or I am sure you would not be interested in the subject in the way you are.

Not that it was much of a fall.  More of a sidestep. I spend a lot of my time writing about and researching the history of science, for books like The Poisoner's Handbook, my recent story of poison, murder and the invention of forensics in the early 20th century. I do so because I believe--no, really, I know--that we cannot understand who we are unless we understand how we got here. And so I was doing some research into the history of chemistry and Faraday's book almost immediately appeared in my browser.

This, I think, is the other magic wrought by on-line publishers like Project Gutenberg. You can be happily rambling through the history of chemistry (a phrase, I know, that only a geek could write) and suddenly discover that a scientist born in the close of the 18th century (1790) understood perfectly the very principles of science communication that you'd been preaching in the 21st century.

Steven Gilbert Really, Really Wants You to Know About Poison

A Small Dose of Toxicology, 2nd edition, by Steven G. Gilbert, 2011, E-pub, Kindle, pdf, 

Reviewed by Deborah Blum

In 2004, a Seattle-based researcher, Steven Gilbert, published a 280-page paperback titled A Small Dose of Toxicology. You might not guess from that modest title that the author was on a scientist on a crusade. But he was. He is.

"It's critical that we scientists be more engaged with the public," he says."We're talking about  environmental issues that are having a bigger and bigger impact on our lives." He had big goals for the book too - he wanted it to contribute to public awareness, to encourage people to demand more of a government response, greater corporate responsbility. He wanted it to change things: "We have an ethical responsibility to our children."

Gilbert had a long-time background in the study of poisonous things. He received a PhD in toxicology from the University of Rochester in 1986. He was founder of the non-profit Institute of Neurotoxicology and Neurological Disorders in Seattle, an affiliate professor at the University of Washington. His particular area of study was in the area of low-dose exposures to toxic chemicals, an area that he was uneasily aware remained poorly understood.

And after some years, he just wasn't sure that the paperback was having the hoped for effect.  Or that his publisher was particularly enthusiastic. So he decided to take it on as a DIY project. "I was originally disappointed. Then, I thought, well I could do this myself." First, he started a website, Toxipedia, which provides a free, searchable database of information on toxic chemicals. And then he started his own e-book publishing company, Healthy World Press, and published the second edition of A Small Dose of Toxicology himself.

The book is one of three now published by Healthy World and all follow the same model. They are offered as free downloads  in either e-pub, Kindle, or pdf format from the Toxipedia website. There's a requested donation to Gilbert's non-profit but it's not required.  "My first goal wasn't to make money," he said. "It was to have an impact."

 I contacted Gilbert after discovering his e-book on the Toxipedia site. This was not, um, my first visit there in search of poisonous information. It's a natural consequence of writing a book about poisons and blogging on that same subject over the last few years. Really. Although sometimes I worry that the search history on my hard drive, riddled with visits to Toxipedia, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, and their ilk suggests the habits of a fairly iffy character.

But anyway - and more to the point, I recognized in Gilbert's work an awareness not unlike my own -  that we exist in a chemical world, that we've yet to map that complicated terrain or fully understand its risks. And that as our adventures in chemistry - taking as a simple example, rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - change our planet, there's an imperative need to do tell that story better.

Still I was curious. 

One can admire the crusade and still wonder if it's actually accomplishing anything. I wondered whether Gilbert's decision to go to e-self publishing improved the paper product in any meaningful way. And it's with those questions in mind that I now want to address the book directly. For comparison purposes, I downloaded it in two different versions on my iPad, as an e-pub (which went direct to my iBooks library) and as a pdf. It's also possible to simply read the book on-line here.

At its most basic, A Small Dose of Toxicology remains a  reader-friendly reference book. As my pdf version tells me, it's still 280 pages. It has 21 chapters (although I had to count them because in the e-version, they are not numbered in the table of contents). The book starts with an overview - "Toxicology and You" , followed by a brief history of poisons and their studies, followed by chapters that focus on a specific toxic substance or issue. The first three chapters do this through a lens of everyday consumption: alcohol, caffeine, nicotine. The book then explores such famously poisonous materials as arsenic, mercury and lead before moving onto subjects such as as endocrine disrupters and radiation exposure.

In other words , it contains many small doses of information about many toxic things. You can see exactly why a poison-obsessed writer like myself would go for the material. But the better thing about it is that it's not written for someone like me. Gilbert is aiming for a more general audience (he tells me he hopes to see it used in high school classrooms) and he succeeds in making this a solidly written, clear, and occasionally fascinating  exploration of toxic chemistry.

Of course, it's hard to make poison too boring. Still, he has a nice technique of using everyday examples to create level-headed explanations, for instance in this section on calculating a toxic dose:

"There are approximately 100 mg of caffeine in a cup of coffee. The actual amount of caffeine depends on the coffee beans, how the coffee was prepared, and size of the cup. And adult weighing 155 pounds (about 70 kg) who consumes this cup of coffee would receive a dose of 100 mg divided by 70 kg or 1.4 mg/kg of caffeine. The importance of including body weight becomes clear if you consider a child who weighs 5 kg (about 11 pounds). If this child consumed the same amount of coffee, the dose would be 100 mg/5 kg or 20 mg/kg, more than ten times higher than the adults."

And he weaves such examples throughout his story, later calculating the half-life of a cup of coffee in the body (about four hours), later again looking at the effect of pregnancy on that half-life question: "During the last two trimesters of pregnancy, caffeine metabolism decreases, and the half-life increases to about twice normal, or 8-10 hours. This means that after caffeine consumption both the material blood levels and the infant's exposure will stay higher for a longer period of time."

These facts and examples are neatly ordered. Each  chapter begins with a "quick facts" chart, followed by a history of the specific poison and its use in society (lead in pipes and paint, mercury in thermometers and so forth), followed by case studies - the recent discovery of lead in children's lunch boxes where it was used to stabilize the plastic - followed by information about health effects, ongoing research, and government regulations.

Occasionally, though, the author goes beyond textbook into advocacy: "We need to reduce the use of lead in a wide range of consumer products," Gilbert writes in the chapter about that heavy metal.  These opinionated moments and his sense of story telling, lift the book beyond standard textbook. Although I suspect that also means that it won't appeal to readers from the anti-environmental movement.

But, you may ask, couldn't he present the advocacy and information just as neatly in a print format? And I've come to believe that he couldn't. Oh, the downloaded books have some of the usual glitches we find in these early days of e-book publishing. I complained earlier that the table of contents in the pdf version didn't provide page numbers for chapters. The iBook version I downloaded skipped the table of contents entirely (I could have tried again for a better result but I just flipped over to the pdf for the information).

But, but, the e-version does work in ways that would just not be possible in print - by which I mean that it offers a dazzling array of live links to additional  information and resources.  The introduction  is followed by four pages of links to regulatory agencies and other organizations around the world that archive information on toxic materials. Further links stud the text and there are yet more at the end of each chapter. Not to mention links to graphics, powerpoints, interactive posters.

Gilbert is especially proud of his Milestones of Toxicology poster, which you can link to from the book or here from the website.  The poster has now been translated into ten languages, mostly recently Arabic. A Chinese translation is in the works. He also likes the idea that as publisher of his own e-book, he can keep it  updated. When I talked to him, he was already planning to add new research papers into the book and, in fact, planning a third edition that would make better use of his website and contain more hyperlinks to Toxipedia.

Yes, empire-building already out in the digital universe. But in a good cause. We really do need to know more about poison.

 

Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer-prize winning science writer and the author of five books, most recently the best-selling The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. She is a professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

All the Beautiful Bioreactors

Living Architecture: How Synthetic Biology Can Remake Our Cities (TED) by Rachel Armstrong. iPad, Kindle, Barnes & Noble.

Reviewed by Annalee Newitz

In the opening section of her long essay, Living Architecture (based on a TED talk), materials designer Rachel Armstrong lays out the problem facing all urban residents in a crisp, moving description of Sendai in the wake of the 2011 earthquake. Buildings in the coastal region of Japan had buckled and crumbled, and its streets pulsed with contaminated water. First responders tried to rescue a dog, but found that it wouldn't leave until they followed it to an area where they discovered another dog, barely breathing. Both animals were taken to safety and given medical attention. What this sad scene underscored was that in the face of disaster, all forms of life try to help each other survive. 

Encapsulated in that tale of two dogs is also the problem and, possibly, a solution to troubles in modern cities. As Armstrong explains, metropolitan areas will be home to nearly two thirds of the Earth's population in the next half century, but they are breakable, dangerous, and depend on unsustainable forms of energy. Still, those cities are filled with life that can make it through disasters that shatter buildings. Armstrong, whose research touches on synthetic biology, asks whether it might not be better to build cities that are as resilient (and compassionate) as the lives inside of them. 

A Cabinet of (Chemical) Curiosities

The Elements, by Theodore Gray, Touch Press Publishing, 2010 Itunes for Ipad

Reviewed by Deborah Blum

I hate to admit this but for some time - okay, almost the two years since it was published - I cherished an attitude about Theodore Gray's dazzling e-tribute to the Periodic Table, The Elements. It was too jazzy, I told myself, too flashy. Of course, what I meant was that it was so successful.

It's easy to maintain that envy about The Elements even today. As The Wall Street Journal noted in a recent story on e-publishing, this virtuoso exploration of our chemical world remains "a runaway best-seller", selling more than 250,000 electronic copies and generating more than $2.5 million in income for Touch Press publishing.

But I'd like to here to get past author envy and take a serious look at what makes this publication so exceptionally successful - and, in fact, so exceptional. I should say at this point that I am superficially acquainted with Theodore Gray - we've both been part of programs on communicating chemistry. And that one of his comments about communicating chemistry has stayed with me- the idea that we can reach people afraid of the subject by showing them that it can also be beautiful.

Because The Elements is, indeed, foremost a thing of beauty. It's actually the electronic version of Gray's 2009 printed coffee table book of the same title, both shimmering with gorgeous images: the versatile element carbon is illustrated by the bright glitter of diamonds, the radioactive element radium is shown through the eerie blue-green glow of a vintage watch dial.  But in the e-book version, these come playfully to virtual life. Some of the elements display in video; nitrogen as a flask swirling with an icy mist of the element in liquid form. Or the reader can set the still images spinning, the diamonds flashing, a vial of gold dust rotating front-label to back. The elements can even been seen in 3D if one purchases the special glasses (which I did not). And it includes an audio recording of Tom Lehrer's classic The Elements Song, which I have played so many times that I am now refusing to disclose the number.

In other words, it's game-like fun in a way that a coffee table book, even with same lovely photos by Gray's colleague, Nick Mann, cannot be.  And it's worth noting that the e-version is sold as an app rather than an e-book. When I decided to give in and download it, I searched fruitlessly through iBooks before discovering it instead in the App Store (On the Touch Press website, it's offered strictly as an iPad app and an iPhone app.) I settled for the iPad version.

So is it actually a book, you might ask, if it's not even sold in a book store, if it's available on a few limited devices? Isn't one of the great achievements of the print publishing era, the ability to share information universally rather than limit it to a select few? And is my ability to spin a virtual copper necklace in comparable to what I learn from reading about that element in straightforward text?  I think The Elements - and its undoubted success - raise all of those questions and more. And I think we're still figuring out the answers along with the future of the publishing business.

But let me briefly make a couple of other comparisons between this and its print version. Both do contain scientific data about each element (atomic number, weight, etc.) In the print book, of course, there's a treasure trove of this right there on the page. In the e-version, there's a compact summary but also much, much more through  clicking on the Wolfram Alpha logo. You'll see the logo in the toolbar at the lower right on the image of the Bismuth page I've shown above; it looks like a fancy red star. This represents one of the ongoing tradeoffs as we move away from print - there's less likelihood of casual acquisition of information. But if we do seek out the online data, it's likely to be more current and more detailed - Wolfram Alpha allows you to go beyond its own database through links to a host of additional scholarly sources.

 Obviously, in its app-like format, Gray's publication emphasizes the visuals over text. It's enticely easy to play with the virtual iodine-laced chewing gum package and skim over the accompanying paragraphs. And that's too bad because if you take the time,  the writing is terrific - funny, smart, knowledgeable, friendly.  In his introduction, Gray writes: "The earth, this iPad, your foot - everything tangible - is made of the elements. Your foot is made mostly of oxygen, with quite a bit of carbon joining it, giving structure to the organic molecules that define you as an example of a carbon-based life form. (And if you're not a carbon based life form: Welcome to Earth....)." There were times when I found the text even more fun than the virtual elements.

 Interestingly, Gray's sequel to this success is a print book,  Theodore Gray's Element Vault, which includes actual samples of elements, such as gold leaf, and replicas of classic documents from the history of chemistry.  In other words, there are still times when a reader wants to hold, touch, review the real thing.  But despite my reluctance to warm up to it, his e-book/app remains a wonderful package. It's no wonder that Gray was awarded the 2011 Grady-Stack award for communicating chemistry from the American Chemical Society - or that the publication has been such a phenomenol e-success. And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm leaving to treat myself for another attack of author envy. Perhaps another 100 or so rounds of The Elements Song will help.

 

Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer-prize winning science writer and the author of five books, most recently the best-selling The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. She writes for publications ranging from Slate to Scientific American and blogs about chemistry and culture at Speakeasy Science. She is a professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.