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The New World of Legal Highs

Uncontrolled Substances: How The Chemical Underground is Going Mainstream. By Mike Power.  Matter, Kindle Single, $.99.

Reviewed by Maia Szalavitz

 

I've been reading and writing about drugs and addiction for over a quarter century (yikes!) so I'm somewhat curmudgeonly in this area: what's news to many isn't likely to be so to me, and even the most egregious errors can only enrage you a certain number of times before you develop, unfortunately, at least some degree of tolerance.

But Mike Power's new Matter ebook, Uncontrolled Substances, is different. 

Power avoids both the clichés and the errors,  delivering a compelling story about a genuinely new development in the drugs world: the advent of so-called "legal highs." These are new synthetic substances similar to illegal drugs that are sold over-the-counter at head shops and convenience stories, often winkingly labeled as apparently innocuous products like "bath salts" or "plant food."

Often never even tested first on animals, the drugs are typically manufactured in Chinese factories and distributed globally via the internet. They range from marijuana-like products to those aimed at mimicking psychedelics or stimulants.

Power takes us into the story in several ways: by describing the difficulties faced by E.R. doctors dealing with overdoses and bad reactions to the substances, by telling the stories of key chemists, and by seeking to have a Chinese company produce a sample of a stimulant once taken legally by the Beatles, John F. Kennedy, Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe that was pulled from the market in 1971. Power weaves these elements together seamlessly, while describing the difficulties that the new substances present to public health and regulators.

Synthetic drugs reveal a fundamental flaw in the foundation of the current international drug control regime, which is its irrationality. It is impossible to make a scientific case for a system that makes cigarettes and alcohol legal for recreational use, some opioids legal in some places for pain relief, and marijuana completely illegal. This means there are no objective criteria in existing law for determining which of the new drugs should be legal and which should not be.

Regulators have tried to address the problem by banning "chemical analogues" of illegal drugs, but this, again, runs into science: drugs that are structurally similar can have very different effects, and drugs that are completely dissimilar structurally can be pharmacologically alike. Simply banning every new drug as it appears also runs into issues with pharma: prohibit willy-nilly and you may unwittingly be blocking cures for cancer, Alzheimer's or depression.

As Power notes, even the hardliners at the United Nations Office of Drug Control Policy admitted in their World Drug Report this year that the system is "floundering" in its attempts to deal with the problem: one in 12 adults worldwide has at least tried one of the drugs.

Uncontrolled Substances offers a fascinating introduction to the issue--but it may, like many drugs, leave you craving more. In this case, however, I highly recommend it!

[Disclosure: I am writing a forthcoming ebook for Matter, with a different editor]

Maia Szalavitz is a neuroscience journalist for TIME.com and other publications. She is author, most recently of Born for Love: Why Empathy is Essential—and Endangered , with Bruce Perry, M.D. Ph.D. Her next book, Unbroken Brain, will examine addiction as a developmental disorder.

Snowfallization

Review of "Sea Change," by Steve Ringman and Craig Welch, Seattle Times. Web site.

Review of "The Course of Their Lives," by Mark Johnson and Rick Wood, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Web site.

Last year on Download the Universe, Veronique Greenwood wrote a review of a story about an avalanche. Journalists write about avalanches fairly regularly, but this piece, called "Snowfall" was different. It was a one-man-band of text, video, maps, and unfolding photos. The story attracted millions of readers and earned scads of awards, including a Pulitzer. And it has ushered in an era of big, ambitious online packages of newspaper reporting. Not surprisingly, science offers some of the best stories for the Snowfall approach.

One recent example is "Sea Change," published last month by the Seattle Times. Photographer Steve Ringman and reporter Craig Welch tackled the immense but little-known disaster that is ocean acidification. The carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere doesn't just warm the atmosphere. It also lowers the pH of sea water, making the chemistry of the ocean dangerous for some species. Oyster companies are already feeling the effects of the dropping pH, and if we continue to acidify the oceans at our current rate, the ecological effects could be tremendous.

Here's a nine-minute video from the project:

The package Ringman and Welch have created has three main text stories. It starts with an overview of acidification research, which is followed by two close-ups on fisheries that are being affected--namely, oysters and crabs. (Both are economically important to the Seattle Times's local readers.) Welch reports the stories in the classic mode of environmental journalism, mixing together in-person reporting in far-flung locations with explanations of the research that revealed the scale of the problem. The photos are impressive, the videos are well made, and the visualizations--which try to convey how big the phenomenon of ocean acidification is--are fairly successful.

If you've already read "Snowfall," the presentation of "Sea Change" doesn't feel like a bolt out of the blue. But that just shows how much our expectations have shifted. Just look back seven years to a similar series called "Altered Oceans" from the Los Angeles Times, to see what I mean. The authors, Kenneth Weiss and Usha Lee McFarling, won a Pulitzer for their efforts, which were even more ambitious than "Sea Change." Rather than focus on one way we're ravaging the oceans, they set out to create a picture of all of them, from pollution to climate change.

Although it came out in 2006, the "Altered Oceans" package of stories holds up well today. But the packaging is showing its age. The fancy front page takes you to five stories that are nothing but text. There are also animations and photos, but they're squirreled away in slow-loading pages. After looking at one of these pages, I discovered there was no way to find my way back to the front page again. Seven years of programming advances made "Snowfall" possible--and now raise our expectations for such ambitious online pieces. (Welch recently discussed the making of "Sea Change" with the Columbia Journalism Review.)

From the mountaintops of "Avalanche" and the open oceans of "Sea Change," we take a claustrophobic trip indoors with "The Course of Their Lives." It's a four-part series from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel about medical students dissecting the cadavers of people who donated their bodies to science. There's no news here, no warning of an impending disaster. Instead, reporter Mark Johnson and photographer Rick Wood faithfully follow students through a remarkable experience--getting to take apart another human being, down to the brain and guts. Wood and Johnson both bring an emotional sensitivity to the project that makes reading it a deeply moving, human experience.

While I would heartily recommend "The Course of Their Lives," I would also point out some shortcomings. I don't want to belittle the piece by talking about them; they're worth talking about as a way to ponder the kinds of decisions that newspapers make when they create Snowfall-esque stories about science.

Some of the bells and whistles attached to "The Course of Their Lives" don't add much. The videos are mostly of talking heads, who sometimes speak stiltedly. Distilling people's words down in compelling written prose remains a superior technology to a video camera that's simply switched on.

I was also underwhelmed by the interactive anatomical diagrams that went along with the stories. They're meant to illustrate the lessons that the students learned about the cadavers, organ by organ. But who actually needs to see lungs light up on a diagram of a body to know what lungs are? The powers of visualization, both online and in apps, are spectacular. (My favorite anatomical example remains this ebook about Leonardo Da Vinci's anatomical sketchbooks.) But there's no point in using those powers simply to check off a box in a to-do list. It's another lesson that we should respect the technology of prose.

Ironically, the prose itself in "The Course of Their Lives" also felt a bit antiquated. American newspaper journalism long ago settled on a certain style. The paragraphs became short, and the sentences shorter. The words needed to be plain and serviceable. There were perfectly good reasons for this approach--but a lot of them had to do with the physical properties of printed newspapers. Stories couldn't be made of densely packed paragraphs, for example, because editors would need the freedom to cut off sections of stories at the last minute to make them fit their available space.

These were good reasons, but they had some odd consequences. Along with their standard fare of short news pieces, newspapers would also prepare a few massive, long-form pieces--Pulitzer-bait, essentially--but these pieces often retained the staccato structure of short news stories. In these sprawling pieces, that style read strangely. And once New Journalism's masters like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese turned magazine features into a new art form, the adherence to the old style in newspapers became even more peculiar.

Today, as newspapers and magazines shift online, that style has grown even more out of date. If you read stories from publications that got their start online, such as the Atavist, you never find the staccato style of old newspaper stories. There's no need to adhere to it.

Thus "Sea Change" and "The Course of Our Lives" serve as illustrations of journalism in transition--created by people trying to figure out how to bring the best of the old world of newspapers and leave the rest behind.

 

(Photos: Top-Steve Ringman, Bottom-Rick Wood)

Carl Zimmer writes the "Matter" column  for the New York Times and is the author of 13 books, including Evolution: Making Sense of Life.

 

Autism, Inside and Out

Asperger Love: Searching for Romance When You're Not Wired to Connect by Amy Harmon. A New York Times/Byliner Original. Available for Kindle, iPad, Kobo, and Nook, $2.99.

And Straight On Till Morning: Essays on Autism Acceptance, edited by Julia Bascom. Published by the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network. Available for Kindle, $2.99.

Reviewed by Steve Silberman

In the early 1990s, a mother told a conference of autism professionals that the upside of having a teenager on the spectrum at home is that they will never want to do the things that often get kids in trouble. There will be no need for awkward conversations about sex, because people with autism are either uninterested in or incapable of intimacy. Parents won't have to worry about a late-night knock on the door from the local sheriff, because autistic teens have no desire to party. If these generalizations now seem naïve, offensive, or some combination of the two, this mother had a lot of company in her assumptions. The notion that people on the spectrum are disinclined to seek connection with others is embedded in the very word autism, which is derived from the Greek word for self, autos.

One of the world's leading authorities on the subject, psychologist Tony Attwood, devotes only a handful of pages in his Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome to sexuality and relationships. Specifically, there are two references to "lack of desire," four to pornography, two to exploitation by predators, and two to celibacy. Casting a further chilling effect on the notion of romance, Atwood cautions potential suitors that people on the spectrum may find a friendly touch on the arm "unpleasant and even difficult to tolerate, let alone enjoy" because of sensory sensitivity, and compares embracing an autistic partner to "hugging a piece of wood." This is the historical backdrop that looms -- albeit invisibly to most readers -- behind the publication of a new ebook by Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times reporter Amy Harmon, Asperger Love: Searching for Romance When You're Not Wired to Connect.

A Few Pounds of Microbes, Only Ounces of Insight

Honor Thy Symbionts, by Jeff Leach. Kindle

Guest review by Kevin Bonham

In 2003, the Human Genome Project--an effort to sequence every gene in a human being--was completed. The success, announced to great fanfare, was supposed to herald a new era in health care. Unfortunately, the promises of personalized medicine, in which treatments are tied to a person's genetic sequence, have not yet come to fruition. A few of the reasons for this are obvious (at least in hindsight). Knowing the location and sequence of a gene is one thing, knowing what it does is quite another. And understanding the role that a gene or gene variant plays in a disease, especially when many afflictions are influenced by tens or hundreds of genes, is even harder.

Complicating matters further is the re-emerging realization that genes are not destiny, and now many new "-omics" projects are beginning to gain attention. From the transcriptome (what genes are actually expressed), to the proteome (proteins and protein modification), to the epigenome (modifications of the DNA that regulate gene expression), more and more researchers are attempting large-scale analysis of entire biological systems and trying to extract meaningful information from enormous data sets. In his new ebook, Honor Thy Symbionts, Jeff Leach aims to tackle what is, in my opinion, the most fascinating of these new -omics revolutions: The Human Microbiome Project.

I desperately wanted to like Leach's book. Even though I've repeatedly heard the refrains, "There are 10 times more bacteria cells in your body than human cells," and "There are 100 times more bacterial genes in your gut than there are human genes," and "Bacteria account for 5 to 10 percent of your body mass," these facts never cease to amaze me. And I've been to enough microbiome-related research talks to know that the microscopic bugs that live in our guts can have profound impacts on our health--from metabolic disorders and type-II diabetes to multiple sclerosis and inflammatory bowel disease. The microbiome deserves a book-length discussion, but Honor Thy Symbionts falls short.

Problems

Problem 1 (I think this is the underlying reason for all of this book's problems): It's not a book, it's a collection of "essays" that are really just blog posts.

In fact, you can go to Leach's website and read almost all of the "chapters" for free on his blog. As I read his alleged book on my Kindle, it was abundantly clear that Leach simply did a large-scale copy-paste, without much additional effort. Spelling and grammatical errors abound, and phrases like "In a series of blog posts starting with this one[...]" only serve to call attention to the fact that I paid three dollars to download something I could just as easily have read on the Internet for free. In one chapter, the text refers to a graph that apparently didn't make it in the migration to Kindle. And since each chapter is really just a blog post, there's no cohesive narrative to tie the book together. Even the unifying "theme" of the microbiome is misleading, since several of the chapters don't even mention microbes.

 

Problem 2: A lot of the science is overstated.

Throughout this book, I had the same feeling of professional scientific unease I get when reading Malcolm Gladwell, without the benefit of Gladwell's ability to spin a narrative. For instance: 

Though improved hygiene has many benefits, scrubbing soil from our bodies and food has thrown our immune system into an over reactive tailspin and is responsible for the skyrocketing increase in allergies and autoimmune disease.

There are several lines of evidence suggesting that hygiene may increase the risk for many inflammatory disorders, but there are plenty of other factors that may play a role, and a marginal increase in risk is a far cry from an "over reactive tailspin."

In another case, Leach describes compelling research suggesting that fiber intake can alter the levels of certain types of microbes. But then he leaps to a prescription how many grams of fiber we should eat each day (an amount significantly higher than current nutritional guidelines).

And in yet another case, Leach spends several pages discussing research on the protein consumption of spider monkeys. Based on this study, he draws conclusions about everything from human diets to agribusiness, sociology and the economics of poverty and health, finally concluding the chapter by pointing out that

This all assumes, of course, that the protein leverage theory plays any role in all of this. Maybe it doesn’t.

At least he admits the ambiguity this time. But then why all the self-assured conclusions? At times I wanted to pull my hair out.

Further complicating this scientific over-reach is Leach's failure to cite the research he's referring to. There's an extensive collection of references at the back of the book, but no link within the text to the reference itself. This seems to be another symptom of copy-pasting from a blog post. The blog posts have web links, but they were apparently were stripped out when the conversion was made.

Problem 3:  Inconsistency of style and complexity.

Leach jumps back and forth from lofty rhetoric:

It is at this interface between the terra firma of our evolutionary past and the enhanced material standard of living[...]

to colloquialisms that border on inanity. Sometimes he makes the jump within a single sentence: 

In just a few thousand centuries, our kind has gone from nesting in trees, to making stone tools and digging roots, to kindling fires, to subduing flora and fauna, to erecting massive cities, and finally to downloading Angry Birds over 1 billion times (and counting).

Leach routinely throws in random and unnecessary digs at creationists. At one he point calls health-care workers who recommend baby formula "predatory." I found the constant movement between grandiosity and link-bait trolling to be jarring. 

Leach also routinely mixes lay-accessible and jargon-laden writing. I know what 16S ribosomal RNA and shotgun pyrosequencing (misspelled as prosequencing) are, but I doubt the target audience of this book will. In some cases, the jargon is useful and adequately explained, but in others it just seems like Leach is trying to show off.

Redeeming Qualities

Despite these glaring problems, I don't think Leach should be written off entirely. A lot of the science he talks about is interesting and important. Our obsession with cleanliness probably does play some role in the increased prevalence of allergies and autoimmunity, even if it's not the only cause. People probably should be eating more fiber, even if we can't make a specific grams/day recommendation. The cheap cost of corn and expense of protein probably explains at least a portion of the paradoxical association of poverty and obesity, even if we can't draw a straight line between spider monkey diets and our own. And the main thesis of this book, that our dietary decisions need to be increasingly informed by our emerging understanding microbiome, is almost certainly correct.

Strangely, Leach himself makes much the same point in the introduction to this book.

While researchers are cautious and right not to oversell the microbiome (much work is still needed to confirm causation for many ailments), the direct or indirect implication of microbes in a staggering number of ailments and diseases of the modern world, reinforces that we are on the cusp of a paradigm shift from the orthodox notions of health and disease.

It's a shame that the author failed to exercise some of that caution himself.

Final Verdict

 There are too many problems for me to recommend this book. Prepare an enormous grain of salt and head over to Leach's blog instead. You'll get most of the same material, including web links to the relevant research so you can fact check any claims that seem overwrought. Meanwhile, I will anxiously await a book that tackles the microbiome and does justice to this amazing new field of research.

 

Kevin Bonham is a graduate student studying the immune system at Harvard University. He blogs about microbes and the immune system at We, Beasties on the Scienceblogs network.

The Elusive Psychology of Mass Murder

The Mind of a Madman: Norway's Struggle to Understand Anders Breivik. By Richard Orange. Kindle Single, $1.99.

Review by Maia Szalavitz

Following Aurora and Sandy Hook— and the concerns that have not surprisingly arisen over the questions of violence, guns and mental illness— I was eager to read journalist Richard Orange’s Mind of a Madman: Norway’s Struggle to Understand Anders Breivik .

The book ably and lucidly details the story of the trial of the man who carried out the world’s deadliest mass shooting by a single individual. It’s full of twists and turns, with Orange expertly doling out the suspense as to whether the killer will ultimately be declared sane or not. But it lacks the context and analysis I’d hoped to find in an account of an event in which psychiatry faces off against what can only be called evil.

Orange, a foreign correspondent for the UK’s Daily Telegraph, covered Breivik’s trial after the Norwegian right wing ideologue killed 8 people in bomb attacks on government buildings in Oslo, then gunned down 69 people, mostly teens, who were attending a political youth camp in July 2011.

Breivik claimed he committed the attacks to “save” Norway from Islam, multiculturalism, “cultural Marxism” and feminism. Initially, a psychiatric report by two of the country’s leading experts claimed that he had paranoid schizophrenia.

Their evidence for this diagnosis was his apparently false claims about being connected to a larger terrorist network, his self-bestowed medals and handmade military “uniform” and his belief that he had the right to kill for his ideas. These were seen as “delusions,” which occurred after a period of social withdrawal before the attacks and his rants were said to contain “neologisms” or made-up words, additional evidence of disordered thinking.

According to the initial report, these factors were apparently enough to qualify Breivik for a diagnosis of schizophrenia under the ICD 10, which is the international medical diagnostic manual and is similar in its psychiatric classifications to the DSM.

“His political world exists just to have a world to be psychotic in,” one of authors of the report testified.

But after the report was leaked, experts on the far right argued that Breivik’s “neologisms” were actually common terms used by others with similar views, making the diagnosis controversial. The ICD criteria apparently require that schizophrenic beliefs be “culturally inappropriate,” and the fact that the other far right groups he saw as his peers had similar views called that into question.

Breivik was surprisingly insightful about this paradox: “What I think is that [they] could not believe that a normal person could do such a thing. A person who does something so terrible cannot be normal. He must be sick.”

After widespread outrage, a second report was ordered. This time, a new group of professionals determined that Breivik had not been psychotic while carrying out the attacks. The second report accepted that his ideology and resulting actions, while clearly despicable, were not in and of themselves evidence of psychosis.

But there was still disagreement among the experts who testified as to what Breivik’s diagnosis— and everyone agreed that there should be one— actually was. Breivik had been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder as a child because of his “pedantic” ways and obsessive compulsive behavior, so one psychiatrist suggested that this led to his “lack of empathy.”

However, a psychologist disagreed with the accuracy of that diagnosis, testifying that during an evaluation, Breivik was “polite and friendly and seemed empathetic.” One of Brievik’s childhood friends had called him “one of the most sociable people” that he knew.

Other psychiatrists argued that Brievik’s real problem was a personality disorder— either narcissistic personality disorder or antisocial personality disorder, probably well into psychopathy— or some toxic combination of the two, along with his racist ideology.

Mind of a Madman, however, does not provide readers enough context to draw conclusions about Breivik's true state of mind. It does not include the ICD diagnostic criteria or give any background information about conditions like personality disorders, schizophrenia and Asperger’s. As a result, it’s very difficult to weigh the battling reports and conflicting testimony. The book doesn’t mention that autism spectrum disorders are not linked with violence, nor does it explore the controversy over the link between schizophrenia and violence. It also fails to examine the question of empathy itself. This quality is critical to several of the diagnoses and seems to have been misunderstood by some of those who testified, incorrectly claiming that autistic people always lack empathy.

While this probably reflects a newspaper journalist’s attempt to be “objective” and simply detail the (most certainly compelling) story of the trial, it left me frustrated. Underneath this story is a tale of the ongoing problems with our current system of psychiatric diagnosis and the lack of objective measures available to characterize mental illness. There’s also a story about why some diagnoses— like schizophrenia— are seen as mitigating, while others— like personality disorders— are seen as aggravating. And of what brain science suggests about moral responsibility.

Moreover, there’s also an untold story of a country which is not bent on vengeance even after such an unimaginable crime, a country that would have accepted either an insanity verdict or the one that came down, which found Breivik morally responsible and sentenced him to 21 years, a sentence that can and likely will be extended if he is still found dangerous at that time.

Of course, a short ebook may not be the place for such depth, but some basic facts about diagnosis and the controversies it evokes would have been extremely useful. There’s certainly room for greater exploration of the Breivik case in light of these distressingly frequent events— and especially for an examination of the role of culture, psychiatric ideas and varying legal systems so that we can become better at preventing or dealing with them.

 

Maia Szalavitz is a neuroscience journalist for TIME.com and the author of five books, most recently Born for Love: Why Empathy is Essential—and Endangered, with Bruce Perry, M.D. Ph.D.

Great Investigations Deserve Great Ebooks

In The Wrong Hands, by Ryan Gabrielson, California Watch/Center for Investigative Reporting. $.99, Kindle Single.

 by Deborah Blum

For well over a year, the investigative reporters at California Watch (part of the non-profit center for Investigative Reporting) have been pursuing a story involving abuse of mentally ill patients in state care -  and of institutional indifference to that abuse.

That investigation, led by Ryan Gabrielson, focused on five state operated centers that house "some of society's most vulnerable citizens - men and women with severe autism, cerebral palsy and other intellectual disabilities living in taxpayer funded institutions." To sum up the results, it found that center residents had been beaten, tortured and raped by staff members. And that a police force, set up to protect resident safety, had apparently helpfully looked the other way.

The stories, first detailed in a series called Broken Shield, are best described as horrifying, a litany that includes the taser burning of a dozen patients, the rape of others, and the death of a quadriplegic patient with cerebral palsy, who died of internal bleeding after three cotton-tipped swabs tore through his esophagus. None of these incidents, as the investigation makes clear, were thoroughly evaluated by the well-paid police force assigned to those centers. In many cases, including the worst ones, no charges were filed.

There's another interesting issue here--the platforms which California Watch used to tell this story--but I'd rather start by considering its importance, its indictment of the way we care for helpless and troubled people, in particular the system in California. And to acknowledge that I'm not alone in this reaction. Everyone from newspaper readers to state officials was appalled. The stories prompted major reorganizations of centers, investigations by outside experts, and new legislation, signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, mandating far stricter law enforcement oversight. This month, the state agreed not to seek Medicare reimbursement for care at the most troubled centers. This is a story that matters, one of the reasons I wanted to bring it up here.

These powerful changes are foremost a result of really powerful reporting. But California Watch also amplified that effect by making sure that its findings were heard across multiple platforms. The stories were placed on its website. They were distributed to newspapers across the state, running in all eight of the state's largest newspapers. They were showcased on radio programs, partly through the center's partnership with KQED. Videos were provided to television stations. California Watch even produced a graphic-novel style video, which illustrated the trauma suffered by patients and their families.

And in December, the Center for Investigative Reporting published the series as a 99-cent Kindle single titled In the Wrong Hands: How a Police Force Failed California's Most Vulnerable Citizens. In one sense, the single is perhaps the least impressive part of this approach. It's a workmanlike summary of the original series rather than a uniquely good e-publication in its own right. The story-telling remains in a basic newspaper format;  there's a puzzling lack of illustration, audio, video or really anything would bring additional life to the telling.

This is less of a problem in a gorgeous narrative or exceptionally fun-to-read story. But this is neither of those things. In the Wrong Hands reads like what it is --a repackaged newspaper series rather than a well-articulated book. It's dense enough and dark enough to occasionally be a challenge to read--exactly the kind of story that benefits from other kinds of media--perhaps even some of California Watch's own novelistic video. I suspect that with a little more time and care, this could have been  a more substantial and more meaningful e-single, one that would have reached  an even wider audience (when I checked on January 21, its Kindle single standing was 364,414).

I respect--and even admire--the California Watch model for distributing news and for solvency in a digital age (briefly outlined here at the Nieman Journalism Lab). But as someone who also has hopes for the e-publishing age that we are growing into, I'd like to argue for setting a high professional standard for e-books, both short and long, one that really moves them beyond old-time print. If we're building a new model of story telling then there's nothing wrong wanting it to be a really good one.

And, after all, a great investigation--which In the Wrong Hands was--deserves a great platform.

Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner's Handbook, published her first e-single, Angel Killer, last year. She writes for numerous publications, blogs about chemistry at Wired, and teaches journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Do we really need to get personal about longevity enhancement?

When I'm 164, by David Ewing Duncan, Published by TED Books (Available for Kindle, iPad, Nook)

Reviewed by Annalee Newitz

Half cultural prognostication and half science journalism, David Ewing Duncan's TED Books longread When I'm 64 explores whether medicine will one day make it possible for us to live forever -- and what would happen to human society if we did. It's a hotly debated topic, and Duncan takes his time tackling every aspect of it in this lengthy essay. Engaging and often fun, the book takes us from the labs where scientists are exploring the genes that control aging, to brain-computer interface demonstrations where paralyzed people are learning to control artificial limbs with their minds. Whether we do it with biology or machines, it's likely that humans will artificially enhance our longevity at some point. Though the prospect of doubling our life expectancy seems crazy to some, Duncan argues it's not entirely implausible. Especially given how far we've come over the past century. 

Still, ethical questions plague the project. While researching his book, Duncan ran a survey online and in his lectures where he asked people if they would like to live beyond the standard 80 years. Most said no, though a significant minority said they wouldn't mind living to be 120 or 164. Those yearning to be immortal represented less than one percent of respondents. Many people felt that living longer than 80 years would mean depleting the Earth's resources even more quickly than we already are. Others worried that young people would have no chance at getting good jobs, since their elders could keep working for decades longer. Some simply felt that living for a long time would be depressing and boring.

Several sections of the book are devoted to Duncan's quest to understand how it would change humanity if we could live much longer than we do now. From the rational world of tissue engineering labs where researchers hope to use 3D printers to make healthy, new organs, he ventures into Singularity University where would-be immortals from Silicon Valley listen eagerly to longevity advocate Aubrey De Gray's prediction that the first person who will live to be 1,000 has already been born. These true believers imagine that science will solve our energy problems and economic difficulties long before overpopulation due to immortality becomes a planet-destroying problem.

As if acknowledging the mostly unscientific nature of the longevity project, Duncan explores its implications by discussing mythology and science fiction about immortality. We may not know what role telomeres play in aging, but we certainly know that The Matrix and Terminator warn against using technology to enhance humans. Given the speculative nature of his topic, Duncan's forays into fiction make a lot of sense, and help provide a cultural frame for debates over longevity enhancement.

Here on Download the Universe, we often discuss how a particular e-book makes use of the medium, whether with enhanced images, video, or even just a good set of links out to more sources. But with When I'm 164, I'd like to talk about a stylistic quirk of e-books that has nothing to do with format: the fact that it's become standard practice for online writing to include a lot of first-person, confessional storytelling. 

Should online writing always be personal? Certainly it's refreshing that online writers try to avoid some of the print media's fake objectivity. But should that always mean authors need to personalize their subjects?

Like a lot of longreads online, Duncan's book veers into the personal. He delves into his sadness at his parents' impending deaths, interviews both them and one of his sons about their views on life extension, and ultimately concludes the book by declaring that he's emotionally torn by the idea of living forever. In some ways, the climax of the book is Duncan's final declaration of ambivalence about scientifically enhanced longevity. I think this personal touch works in some ways -- it helps to draw the reader in, and acknowledges the highly personal responses that many people have to this area of research.  

But it often reads as cheesy and unnecessary, as if Duncan were just going through the motions of making his online writing more personal than print.  Of course it's easy to sympathize with his sadness at a parent's decline, but there is nothing particularly insightful or unusual to Duncan's first-person stories about these issues. He paints the scientists and thinkers he's consulted for this book in far more interesting detail than he paints himself. The first person bits just weren't necessary to make this story compelling.

Duncan is at his best when coaxing out intriguing speculations from scientists, engineers and philosophers about their views on life extension. Duncan's observations of their work form the meat of this extremely gripping tale about one possible future -- of enhanced longevity -- that could arise from contemporary medical science.

Annalee Newitz is the editor-in-chief of io9.com, and the author of Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (coming in May 2013 from Doubleday).

Cold Blooded: A Doping Investigation Primer

Cold Blooded by Jere Longman. $1.99 (Amazon Prime members can borrow the book for free.) Available as a Kindle single.

Guest review by Christie Aschwanden

In early October, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) released hundreds of documents implicating seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong in something the agency dubbed the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen. Jere Longman's Kindle Single Cold Blooded is essentially a Cliff Notes version of the USADA report.

In just 49 pages, Longman's ebook provides a cohesive synopsis of the case. Condensing the material was no easy feat. The USADA report contains 200-plus pages, including affidavits from more than 25 witnesses and hundreds of supporting documents, such as bank records and blood test results. Longman expertly turns this data dump into a readable summary that contains both the most important evidence (Armstrong's payments of more than one million dollars to Italian doctor Michele Ferrari) and the most amusing, such as Armstrong teammate David Zabriskie' parody of the Jimi Hendrix tune Purple Haze,

EPO all in my veins

Lately things just don't seem the same

Actin' funny, but I don't know why

'Scuse me while I pass this guy

The Zabriskie anecdote aside, Longman's writing is detached and uninspiring, no doubt because he pieced the story together from the USADA documents rather than first-hand reporting. The following passage is typical:

Shortly after the 2000 Tour de France ended, French authorities began an investigation into suspected doping by Armstrong and the Postal Service team. An anonymous letter had been sent to prosecutors in Paris. A television crew had spotted two men - Postal Service team personnel - tossing medical waste into a trash container.

For readers unfamiliar with cycling and the Armstrong case, Longman's book supplies a quick yet substantial overview. The work also stands as a convincing example of the ebook format's utility for condensing a bolus of evidence into a useful summary. I can imagine similar treatments for the next celebrity scandal or even the latest IPCC report.

Those familiar with the Armstrong case will find nothing new in Longman's ebook. If you're looking for character development or analysis, you're better off reading From Lance to Landis by David Walsh, or his forthcoming Seven Deadly Sins. Longman's colleague at the New York Times, Juliet Macur, also has a book in the works, and the USADA case report itself makes fascinating reading. Some of the affidavits weave narratives as compelling as you'll find in any novel.

The Lance Armstrong that emerges from the USADA report is a narcissistic bully who becomes increasingly vindictive toward those who dare to question him. He slaps lawsuits at his accusers and at one point, he sends a threatening text to the wife of a teammate who's set to testify against him. The evidence outlined in Cold Blooded leaves little doubt that Armstrong was a leader in what USADA CEO Travis Tygart calls a conspiracy "professionally designed to groom and pressure athletes to use dangerous drugs, to evade detection, to ensure its secrecy and ultimately gain an unfair competitive advantage through superior doping practices." As ESPN sports writer Bonnie Ford wrote following the report's release, "anyone who remains unconvinced [of Armstrong's guilt] simply doesn't want to know."

There's been a lot of deliberate not knowing over the years, and Armstrong was not the first to exploit it. Doping has been a part of cycling since nearly the beginning. The sport did not originate in the Olympic tradition but as a competition to get from here to there as fast as possible on your own steam. In the cycling's early days, racers often took cognac or amphetamines in hopes of boosting their performance. Back then, such practices weren't considered cheating. Drugs were eventually banned to protect rider health, not as a result of ethical qualms.

When U.S. team doctors and coaches blood doped members of the 1984 Olympic cycling team, they broke no official rules. Some of the team's riders refused to participate in the doping scheme, but they came to that decision via their own moral standards. Rules against doping received very little enforcement until the formation of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and its U.S. affiliate USADA in 1999, and even then, cycling's governing body remained more interested in protecting its sport's reputation and its rainmakers than in any notions of fair play. In Cold Blooded, Longman describes how Armstrong paid the UCI to cover up a positive test at the Tour of Switzerland in 1999 and the New York Daily News has reported that Nike, a long-time sponsor of Armstrong and his cancer foundation, helped pay for the bribe. 

Armstrong didn't invent doping, he just did it better than anyone else before him. He understood from the beginning that fans wanted something bigger than life to believe in, and he was more than willing to oblige. His triumph over cancer gave hope to countless patients around the world, and cancer became his shield to deflect criticism. Hope was a product he could sell to his sponsors and the public. He built an empire around a false story. As I've written elsewhere, even his comeback from cancer was not as remarkable as it seems. His fraud succeeded with the complicity of accomplices and bystanders who stood to gain from his success.

Some of these co-conspirators, such as team director Johan Bruyneel and doping doctor Michele Ferrari also face sanctioning in the USADA case. Other participants in the doping culture, like Bjarne Riis and Jonathan Vaughters, remain leaders in the sport to this day.

Cycling was dirty when Armstrong arrived at the sport. The question that remains is, will it remain dirty now that he's gone?

 

Christie Aschwanden is a contributing writer for Bicycling Magazine. She has written about doping for NPR, New Scientist, The Washington Post, BBC Future, and Smithsonian. She blogs about science at Last Word On Nothing.

 

Evolving Fish, A Dying Sea, And A New Genre: Digital Comics Science Journalism

Symbolia. First issue free. Subsequent individual issues $1.99. Annual subscription $11.99. Available as an iPad app or pdf; other devices to come. See web site for details. 

Comics first gained respectability as art, then as storytelling, and more recently as comics journalism. Joe Sacco's celebrated Safe Area Goradze, for example, showed how comics journalism could deliver powerful portrait of life during wartime. Published in 2001, Safe Area Goradze was the product of a pre-ebook age, the sort of printed work that you might buy as a deluxe hardbound edition and display on a shelf. A decade later, comics journalists are increasingly giving up paper and going digital.

A new example of this new genre is Symbolia, a magazine that released its first issue this week. It's been generating a good deal of buzz, with write-ups in venues like the Columbia Journalism Review, Poynter, and Publisher's Weekly. I decided to check it out and discovered a creation that was fit for reviewing at Download the Universe. That's because three out of the five stories in the first edition are about science.

Can Science Ever Truly Liberate Us From Evil?

Angel Killer, by Deborah Blum (The Atavist, October 2012). Available via The Atavist app and for Kindle.

Reviewed by Annalee Newitz

With the essay Angel Killer, science historian Deborah Blum (a DTU editor) takes us into the disturbing world of Albert Fish, a serial killer who raped, murdered and ate perhaps dozens of children in New York City during the 1920s. But this essay is more than an elegant true crime story of atrocious transgression and dogged detection. It exposes the origins of a clash between the scientific and religious approaches to punishment, by reminding us of the most important aspect of the Fish case. Generally, the "Gray Man," as he was nicknamed, is remembered for his ghoulish crimes against children -- and himself, as he was fond of driving needles into his groin. In Angel Killer, however, Blum makes the case that his trial is what should go down in history. It was the first high-profile trial where psychologists argued that a murderer should not get the death penalty for reasons of insanity. 

Though we hear the phrase "not guilty by reason of insanity" a lot in fiction, Blum points out that in reality it is not generally a successful plea. Even today, very few criminals are found to be insane, even when they've done things that are as beyond the pale as Fish's cannibalistic rituals. By retelling the story of Fish and the society that condemned him to death, Blum is able to explore one of the areas where scientific reason is most often swept aside for an Old Testament notion of "eye for an eye" justice. Though judges, juries, and even psychologists knew that a child killer like Fish was in fact insane and therefore unable to distinguish between right and wrong, they could not bring themselves to treat him the way psychology would demand. Instead of offering him treatment, Fish's peers resorted to an ancient and ultimately superstitious notion that he was simply evil and therefore should be struck down by the state for his acts.  

Though we can see the war between scientific and religious ideas of transgression slowly building throughout Blum's essay, she never beats the reader over the head with socio-political analysis. Instead, she allows the story to speak for itself. One of the most intriguing characters to emerge, other than the mysterious Fish, is the psychologist who worked most on the killer's case. That was the young Fredric Wertham, who became famous in the 1950s for arguing that violent and sexual images in comics were inspiring juvenile delinquency in his book The Seduction of the Innocent. Wertham, who worked with many of New York's poorest populations, was eager to take on Fish's case because he was all too familiar with how little attention was usually paid to the sorts of working class and impoverished families who had lost their children to Fish's knife. 

Wertham was also oddly sympathetic to Fish. After hours of interviews with the jailed killer, Wertham became convinced that Fish was absolutely insane. Aside from his known crimes, Fish also spoke to angels, mutilated himself, and had religious delusions about becoming a god. He'd even been committed to asylums a couple of times, once by his own daughter. Wertham wanted to find out how such a man could have been in and out of mental institutions without anyone ever noticing that he was violently unstable. In court, Wertham argued that Fish could not have understood that his crimes were wrong, and that he deserved life in a mental institution rather than the electric chair.

What emerges from Blum's tale of Wertham's court battle is a profound sense of our struggle as a culture to deal scientifically with mental illness. Most people fundamentally believe that criminals like Fish are "bad" and "evil" and should therefore be killed. Psychologists today still fight to convince juries and the public that some criminals have damaged minds, shaped by horrific circumstances. Fish's story, which begins with his abusive childhood in an orphanage, is a classic tale of a troubled person who was neglected and mistreated by the very institutions that were supposed to aid him. Even the psychologists who saw him as an adult, and knew about his profound delusions, released him onto the street because he was "sane enough." Instead of recovering, Fish only sank more deeply into madness.

Blum's essay is available via the Atavist app, whose enhancements make the experience of reading almost cinematic. The story begins with a haunting 1920s-era film of Staten Island ferries docking in downtown Manhattan, set to period music. Maps of the crime scenes walk us through the early twentieth century streets of New York City like we were cops on the beat. And Blum treats us to snapshots of the screaming headlines about Fish's murders and trial, which help us understand how his crimes were depicted at the time. At one point, we have the opportunity to pull up a creepy letter that Fish sent to the mother of one of his victims (complete with a warning that it may be too graphic for some readers). The multimedia extras never feel extraneous, and aid enormously with the historical scene-setting required here.

Ultimately Angel Killer is not a story of crime -- it is a story of how we understand crime. More than that, it is about how science has the opportunity to change profoundly the way we treat both criminals and the mentally ill. The tragedy is that when it comes to human atrocity, science often fails to persuade us and superstition takes over. Albert Fish was killed in the electric chair at Sing Sing in 1936.

Annalee Newitz is the editor-in-chief of io9.com, and the author of the forthcoming book Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive the Next Mass Extinction.