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How a locked-in woman took control of a robot arm

The Electric Mind written by Jessica Benko. The Atavist, 2012. Kindle Singles, The Atavist app , iBooks, and other outlets via The Atavist website.

Reviewed by Ed Yong

Throughout the history of neuroscience, we have gained an inordinate amount of knowledge by studying people with severe brain damage, and watching how they manage to live. HM’s surgically altered brain revealed secrets about how memories are formed – after his death, he was revealed to be an American man called Henry Molaison. KC, a Canadian man whose real name is still unknown, also taught us much about how memory works, following brain damage sustained during a motorcycle accident. SM, a woman with an inherited brain disease, reportedly feels no fear.

These patients are known by abbreviations that preserve their anonymity, but also shroud their contributions. Their hopes, struggles and lives are condensed into patterns of injury and aberrant behaviours, and distilled into pairs of letters. But sometimes, very rarely, we get a privileged opportunity – a chance to unpack the people behind the letters, and to learn not just how they became a part of science, but how science became a part of them.

Jessica Benko’s new story, The Electric Mind, provides just such an insight. It is the latest in an increasingly strong portfolio of stories from The Atavist, a digital publisher that produces stories “longer than typical magazine articles but shorter than books”.

The Electric Mind is the story of Cathy Hutchinson, a woman known in the scientific literature as S3. She’s a mother-of-two who was “always goofing around and singing and dancing”, until a stroke disconnected her brain from her spinal column and left her with an active mind imprisoned in a frozen frame.

For several years, Cathy has been taking part in a groundbreaking experiment called BrainGate – not a sordid cerebral scandal, but a bold project that aims to give paralysed people control over mechanical limbs. The scientists behind the project fitted Cathy with microscopic electrodes that read the neural buzz within her motor cortex – the area of her brain that controls movements. The implant acts like an electronic spine that links Cathy’s brain to a computer or robot, bypassing her own immobilised flesh.

At first, she used the electrodes to control the movements of an on-screen cursor. More recently, she commandeered a robotic arm. As she thought about grabbing a bottle, the electrodes deciphered her mental commands and the arm carried them out. “For the first time in 14 years—indeed, for the first time for any quadriplegic—Cathy was able to reach out into the world.”

The project’s crowning results are published today in the journal Nature, concurrently with the launch of Benko’s story. The paper itself preserves Cathy’s anonymity, and describes her in the starkest of terms. She’s “a 58-year-old woman with tetraplegia caused by brainstem stroke… She is unable to speak (anarthria) and has no functional use of her limbs. She has occasional bilateral or asymmetric flexor spasm movements of the arms that are intermittently initiated by any imagined or actual attempt to move. S3’s sensory pathways remain intact.”

The reality behind these cold, precise words comes through in Benko’s skilful narration. Right from the start, she plunges us into Cathy’s world, as she wakes from a coma to hear the sound of the ventilator beside her bed.

We get to know Cathy through Benko’s eyes, as she tracks down the woman via her son, and meets her for the first time. First-person accounts can break the fourth wall to a distracting extent, and many journalists would balk at inserting themselves so prominently into a story. But Benko earns her place as a protagonist in her own tale, in a way that reminds me of Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The author’s quest becomes an inextricable part of the story itself. Through Benko’s expectations of meeting Cathy, her descriptions of their first meetings, and her difficulties in interviewing a woman who can only communicate via eye-flickers, we learn the extent of Cathy’s disability, and the frustrating complexity of seemingly simple tasks.

Writing about extreme disability (and attempts to overcome it) is not easy. You’re always an adjective away from being mawkish, and an adverb away from being ghoulish. Benko deftly negotiates the tightrope. She cleverly uses essays from other locked-in patients to describe hardships that would sound overwritten from her own hand. And she’s a master of keenly observed but simply delivered prose. When Cathy laughs, for example, it’s “a short burst of air that vibrated across vocal cords she can’t voluntarily control.” No embellishments required. These scenes throw their own punches. Benko just puts you in the ring.

Benko’s eye for detail also elevates her descriptions of experiments that have been reported again and again in the press. We see what Cathy’s nursing home room is like. We learn that the electrodes were fired onto her brain with “a pneumatic device like a tiny air hammer”. We discover that the bottle that Cathy lifted via robot was a thermos full of coffee (she loves coffee), “emblazoned with the initials and insignias of the research team and sponsors”. She finds drama in minutiae. While other reporters rush straight for a snare-drum crash of incredible implications, Benko takes her time with scenes that build to a steady crescendo.

Using Cathy’s story as an anchor, The Electric Mind stretches back in time to look at the historical events that preceded BrainGate (including a horse accident and suspected psychic powers). The story also pulls outwards at other means of reaching the same ends, such as functional electrical stimulation, where electrodes stimulate a patient’s own muscles instead of a robotic limb.

These sections, where we leave Cathy and focus on the field at large, are arguably the weakest elements of the story. Around the two-thirds mark, the tale threatens to veer off course. From rich details about a woman steering a robot arm with difficulty, we’re suddenly plunged into hand-waving speculation about infrared vision, Avatar-like… well…. avatars, and telepathic soldiers (and the irony of reading a journalist’s words about electronic telepathy on a handheld device was not lost on me).

But then, in a rather daring move, it becomes clear that this was exactly the point (keep an eye out for the start of Chapter Seven). All the other characters not involved in BrainGate, from Nicolelis to a ridiculously breathless DARPA spokesperson, serve as foils for Cathy. Their visions are too far removed from the reality of her condition. They remind us about what The Electric Mind could easily have been – a story of technological triumph and glorious futurism. Instead, Benko has treated us to something far better – a story of extreme limitations and what happens when people (and science) run up against them.

*****

Ed Yong is a British science writer who writes the award-winning blog Not Exactly Rocket Science. His work has appeared in Nature, New Scientist, the BBC, the Guardian, the Times, Wired UK, Discover, CNN, Slate, the Daily Telegraph, the Economist and more. He lives in London with his wife. He has never been impregnated by a botfly but he does rather like ants.

A Lost Explorer Returns: Todd Balf's "Farthest North"

Farthest North: America's First Arctic Hero and His Horrible, Wonderful Voyage to the Frozen Top of the World. Byliner Orignals. $1.99  Publisher site.

Reviewed by David Dobbs

When people today imagine scientists, they tend to picture a man in a white lab coat, glasses, and a scraggly beard. A century and a half ago, however, people imagining a scientist were more likely to conjure a man with a heavy fur coat, a telescope, and a beard twisted not by eccentricity but by the gales of distant places. It was the great age of exploration, when many scientists did their work afoot or at sea. The scientist was a person not just of thought but of action.

In America, no one typified this scientist-explorer image more thoroughly than Elisha Kane, an unlikely explorer who trained formally in neither science nor seamanship; who led one of the era's most extraordinary and influential polar journeys; who was ill much of his life but found extraordinary strength during his severest trials; and who convinced himself and others, for a time, that he had made one of the most important discoveries of his era, only to be largely forgotten. He vividly occupies Todd Balf's Farthest North: America's First Arctic Hero and His Horrible, Wonderful Voyage to the Frozen Top of the World.

This is great material, and Balf, a former editor at Outside, handles it deftly. He gets the scientific dilemmas spot-on while telling a gripping, overlooked tale. He also paints a wonderful picture of how a person's qualities, applied with energy and savvy, can find the doors of opportunity in an era and knock them open.

For the restless Kane, the exploration of the Arctic proved an irresistible draw. The voyage examined here was his second, but the first under his command. The prior journey, which he took as a naval officer, went so badly from an exploratory point of view that its leader happily left the traditional captain's author's account to Kane. Kane, with a romantic's heart and a novelist's touch for earthy detail, seduced  the American public  with an Arctic world they paid  little heed to before; his treatment was half Twain, half Whitman, says Balf. Their mission had been to find and rescue the lost British explorer John Franklin, who had disappeared years before while seeking the Northwest passage. Kane's poignant description of the traces they found of Franklin's path — an abandoned camp with three sailors' graves, an armorer's forge, and a pair of officer's gloves washed and set out to dry — flamed enough interest in Franklin's fate to generate funding for a second rescue attempt, this one led by Kane. 

So in May 1853 he set sail. He would search not just for Franklin, but for the "Open Polar Sea" — a coveted passage to the North, and ultimately the Pacific. Kane suspected Franklin may have found this sea but not lived to report or take credit for it. A British adventurer named Inglefield, thinking likewise, set sail from England at about the same time thatKane did, and on the same mission. Kane's trip was at once an attempt at rescue, a test of a hypothesis, a bid for fame, and a race.

As a scientific venture, his search for an Open Polar Sea posed all the seductions and dangers of any powerful idea. It tempted not only extremes of action but the perceptual warping we're all subject to — the tendency to see what one wants to see. The expedition's naturalist-surgeon, Isaac Hayes, encountering in the hills around Baffin Bay a "lush summer bloom," thought it presaged mild weather and open water ahead. Likewise, as they worked their way up through Baffin's ice flows that July of 1853, both Hayes and Kane found hope in seeing many animals moving northward, as if warmth lay there.

They soon found otherwise. Above Baffin they met cold gales that sent the ship careening among ice floes. The sea glazed over. Two weeks later, the ice seized them. They were further north than anyone had ever wintered and survived — 78 degrees, 44 minutes. And though it was only September, it soon became apparent that winter was coming early and hard. Over the next 18 months, locked in ice the whole time, the men suffered a near-continous stretch of arctic torments: weeks on end of darkness and subzero temperatures; scurvy that turned old wounds into open sores; frostbite that forced amputations. Kane's journal through those winters, writes Balf, "is a record of unbroken misery." 

Kane's great feat is that he got 14 of his 17 men through an ordeal that should have killed them all. Through the second winter, Kane, who actually felt stronger then than in the winter before, relentlessly nursed and cajoled and supported his men, even as he himself sometimes bordered on delirium. It was a spectacular triumph of deadening, dumb, determined endurance. Finally, in the spring of 1855, they abandoned the ship. After weeks of dragging two lifeboats southward over300 miles of brutal terrain to reach open water, they sailed 1200 miles to Greenland and safety. 

That October, Kane returned to the United States to a hero's welcome, his book-won fame spread explosively by news of his survival. But his health deteriorated. When he died in 1857 in Cuba, where he'd gone hoping to recuperate, it made all the front pages. His funeral procession from New Orleans back home to Philadelphia was watched by thousands -- the biggest public mourning the young country had yet seen. It wouldn't be topped until Lincoln was shot. His status is suggested by a banner overhanging Fifth Avenue: "Science Weeps, Humanity Weeps, the World Weeps."

Now few know of Kane. He's rarely mentioned in short lists of great Arctic explorers. Balf's tale serves both as an historical corrective and a sort of fable of the fickleness of fame and the cruel risk of reaching for but failing to bring home a big idea. "Like the earliest, most ambitious pioneers to any new land, he got some things wrong," writes Balf. "He also got a lot right." He found new ways to survive cold and hunger. He returned "by a smart retreat and an unprecedented alliance with the native Inuit; he worked tirelessly to nurse his party back to strength." 

This contrasts, Balf notes, with Franklin, who died early on and left his men to march to their deaths. Kane's program for surviving an Arctic winter "was brilliant … and duplicated by almost all future Arctic expeditions," including Shackleton's more famous escape. A notable exception is Scott's disastrous but romantic failure at the South Pole, which arose partly because he ignored some of Kane's lessons and innovations. Yet both Franklin and Scott remain far better known, probably because they did not return. And Shackleton's name far outshines Kane's, even though Kane accomplished something every bit as difficult and unlikely. They both did the impossible. Shackleton's impossible was just more obvious. 

It didn't help that someone else largely solved the mystery of Franklin's party. Kane also had the back luck to get the science wrong.

In that spring of 1855 in which he finally took his men south and home, he first sent two of the strongest men north to take one more shot at finding the Open Polar Sea. They marched 200 punishing miles, all the way to 81N, 22', "shedding everything" to get that far. There they encountered a 500-foot bluff. Only one of the men, steward William Morton, had the strength to climb it. When he reached the top, he saw before him an "unfrozen sea" with "waves, … surging from the furthest north, breaking at my feet." A northerly gale blew in his face — but carried no ice toward him. The open water stretched north to the horizon.

From this tantalizing data point — a big, fat, seemingly infinite n of 1 — Kane drew an understandable conclusion: He had found the Open Polar Sea. Balf properly forgives Kane this error. And when he reveals the freakishly unique alignment of forces and events from which this false finding rose — an assembly that starts with Franklin and ends with an astonishing satellite photo taken in 2010 — it's hard not to join him. For the full, strange, richly told story, steer your browser to Farthest North.

 

David Dobbs, the author of The Atavist e-book bestseller My Mother's Lover, writes on science, culture, and sports for publications including The Atlantic, The New York Times Magzine, National Geographic, and Slate. He blogs at WIRED  and is now writing his fourth book, The Orchid and the Dandelion. 

 

 

Titanic: The e-Book Nobody Loved

Titanic: Uncovering the Secrets of the World's Greatest Shipwreck, by National Geographic Shorts. National Geographic. Amazon Kindle/iBooks/Barnes& Noble

Reviewed by Jennifer Ouellette

Last fall, ABC launched a lazy, cynical reboot of the iconic 1970s TV series Charlie's Angels, hoping to cash in on the whole nostalgia trend. NPR's Linda Holmes wrote one of the most insightful reviews I've seen in a long time about just why the reboot was so much worse than the many other silly or trashy shows that mysteriously find their way onto primetime TV. To wit: nobody involved ever really loved the show, not even a little. This, Holmes writes, is what she hates most about TV:

"It's these dead, unloved, pre-chewed blobs that are spat out over and over again, truly serving no purpose other than filling time between commercials. Nobody thinks this show is fun, nobody thinks this show is interesting, nobody thinks this show is cool. Nobody thinks this show is anything. Nobody loves it, and you can tell."

I found myself reflecting on Holmes' observation while flipping through Titanic: Uncovering the Secrets of the World's Greatest Shipwreck, a National Geographic "short" released just in time for the 100th anniversary of the famous sinking, which claimed the lives of more than 1500 people. NatGeo isn't the only organization seeking to cash in on the RMS Titanic's historical landmark moment; there's a reason James Cameron released Titanic 3D this year, after all, and most news outlets have obliged with their own takes on the tragedy.

The story of Titanic has captured the public's imagination for a century and inspired countless books and films, so I get why a publisher would be interested in capitalizing on a "sure thing" in these tough economic times. And as a lifelong Titanic fan, I'm absolutely the target audience. Alas, I'd be hard pressed to find a more lackluster,  uninspired, and disappointing excuse for a retrospective than this. Honestly? It feels like an afterthought. This is the e-book that nobody loved. And I paid $3.99 for the privilege.

Michael Sweeney's prose is clean and competent, if a bit workmanlike, and he does a decent job of bringing a few telling details and heartstring-tugging personal stories to the fore. He dutifully sums up the various theories about the sinking, and Robert Ballard's discovery of the wreckage on the ocean floor in 1986.

But this is well-traveled ground. We've heard most of these stories and met all these people before. There is very little here one couldn't find with a quick 15-minute Google search, or by leafing through one of the umpteen prior books about Titanic that are available.

That's not necessarily a problem -- especially for those sad souls on Twitter who have only just realized Titanic wasn't just a blockbuster movie -- but if you're going to rework old material and go the trouble of packaging it into an e-book, it's generally a good idea to find some new twist, a new way to shape the narrative, something to make it seem fresh. That freshness, alas, is sorely lacking here.

Still, that would have been less of an issue if the production values were a bit higher. There is so much good material in the way of old photographs and illustrations relating to Titanic, yet all we are given is the usual smattering of archival photographs, plunked perfunctorily at the end of each chapter. Not every e-book needs to be an expensive app with impressive bells and whistles, but a little more effort on that score would have added a bit of much-needed pizzazz to the presentation.

Cameron's blockbuster film has garnered its share of snark as well as praise over the years, but whether it's your cup of cinematic tea or not, you can tell Cameron loved that project. It's a reimagining of a timeless tale, not just a regurgitation of the same old stories. Cameron poured his heart and soul into it, obsessing over the smallest detail, and he's still at it, as evidenced by the new CGI animation below -- a dynamic model of the sinking sponsored, ironically, by National Geographic.

You just can't fake that kind of passion. And that's precisely what's missing from this e-book. Nobody seems to have cared enough to bring that extra spark of creativity to the project, perfectly content to just serve up a warmed-over rehashing of the events. In fact, it's possible that I expended more thought and time on this review than anyone spent on Titanic: Uncovering the Secrets of the World's Greatest Shipwreck. Titanic deserves better.

Image: "Untergang der Titanic" by Willy Stöwer, 1912. Public domain.

Jennifer Ouellette is the author of several popular science books, most recently The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse. She also blogs at Cocktail Party Physics and Discovery News. Follow her on Twitter.

Have I Got A Moon Rock For You...

The Case of the Missing Moon Rocks, written and illustrated by Joe Kloc. The Atavist, 2012 (Atavist app for iPhone or iPad,/Kindle/Nook/iBook/Kobo)

The sheer noise and spray of rhetorical fæces produced by the swarms of pygmy wretches infecting the U.S. political system these days makes it hard, sometimes, to reconstruct the full metal weirdness of the state of the nation way back when.  That would have been my teen years, in the ‘70s, that time when those of us who aspired to the writing life had to buy our slates and no. 2 chisels directly from actual carbon-based life forms.  We did so while watching the triumph and collapse of the King Rat of crazed, feral politicians, the 37^th of his office, our own unindicted co-conspirator, Richard Milhouse Nixon.  (Cue this number.)

It’s truly hard to convey just how evil, absurd, and oddly grand Nixon was to those who have only experienced the banal corruptions and miseries of the current scene, but the trademark Nixonian mix of paranoia, calculation, and genuine aspiration to statesmanship produced public theater the likes of which I do not think we’ll see again in my lifetime.  Just how odd?  Well, to get a taste, just a hint of the nooks and crannies of history into which even Tricky Dickie’s most trivial by-blows could lead, check out Joe Kloc’s tale of one man’s pursuit of what might be termed Nixon’s moon-struck folly.

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. 

One man and his superorganism

Before the Swarm, by Nicholas Griffin. The Atavist, 2011 (Atavist app for iPhone or iPad/ Kindle/ Nook/ iBook/ Kobo)

Reviewed by Ed Yong

 

When we first meet Mark Moffett, the man at the centre of Before the Swarm, he is grinning about a botfly maggot that has died in his hand. Not in the palm of his hand, mind you, but implanted within the flesh.

The rest of the tale – the third in The Atavist’s growing stable of long-form non-fiction – proceeds along similar lines. 

Nicholas Griffin narrates the life of an ant-loving scientist who self-describes as “Dr Bugs”, plays at both journalism and photography, and frequently disappears on long jungle odysseys. He loves the world’s most painful insect, but he loathes universities. Standing outside of the scientific establishment, he has been criticised for favouring mass media and compelling stories over testing hypotheses and collecting data. There is a compelling counterpoint, which Griffin notes early on, between the ants, whose societies revolve around “hierarchy and specialisation” and Moffett, who “can’t seem to stand either one”.

Griffin’s writing is wonderfully lean and evocative. When Moffett speaks, it is with tight snippets of dialogue (he introduces his parasite with “Have you met my botfly?” and greets the legendary E. O. Wilson with “Hi Ed”). When he is described, it is with tight, unadorned prose.

Then again, one gets the sense that Moffett doesn’t require much embellishment. He’s a writer’s dream protagonist: quotable, possessed of a rebellious streak, and prone to misadventure. He electrocutes himself! He gets kidnapped! He’s been bitten! There is a real risk here that the tale could descends into a list of amusing anecdotes – less a cohesive story, and more The Continuing and Wacky Adventures of Mark Moffett.

But just when Before the Swarm starts to veer down that direction, Griffin hits you with genuine tragedy at the midpoint. I’ll stop short of explicit spoilers but it involves the quote, “That’s a fucking krait.” It’s a turning point, and Griffin deals with it well, giving it room to breathe and ramify. It changes the feel of the earlier lists of derring-do from a Boy’s Own adventure into a tally of genuinely dangerous pursuits.

Then, in the second half, after much time with the man’s history and exploits, his ideas finally get a chance to shine. Sadly, they merely flicker. Here, arguably where it matters most, Moffett becomes a bit-player in his own story.

We learn that, riffing off E.O. Wilson, Moffett thinks that human and ant societies both follow similar rules, and develop similar features, as they get bigger. And we’re told that this is a “fresh idea” even though it feels somewhat familiar.

We’re told that Moffett advocates the idea of ant colonies as superorganisms – that is, they behave like a single being. The superlatively successful Argentine ants are the prime example: its colonies contain billions or even trillions of individuals, genetically similar and spread across entire states. But while Griffin writes about the theory’s origins a century ago, and we meet another scientist who has “written nearly 50 papers on the subject”, Moffett’s own contribution remains quite vague. Griffin says that he is “looking to move beyond simple metaphors” but then relies heavily on metaphors that liken ants to white blood cells and urban humans. The very idea of a superorganism is itself a metaphor.

The scientifically minded reader is then left with many questions. What does it actually say about ants to treat a colony as a single organism? What insights or testable predictions come of it? How has our hero actually advanced the science of superorganisms? None of these is clear. He is probably embroiled in a meaty intellectual debate, but it never truly surfaces. A fellow scientist criticises the idea of an Argentine ant supercolony for untold reasons, and Moffett is later seen attempting to dismantle the critique on untold grounds. In lieu of details, we’re left with the idea of a superorganism as nothing more than a neat framing device, rather than the dogma-shaking “controversial theory” that the standfirst promises.

We might have expected it. The first third of the story, after all, is devoted to telling us how Moffett has a predilection for evocative ideas over solid hypotheses. It’s still a sting in an otherwise great story, but ultimately it’s not a deal-breaker. While Before the Swarm fails as the story of a brave new idea, it amply succeeds as a profile of a fascinating man.

And it ends with a video of a maggot erupting from the skin of its protagonist. That helps too.

*****

Ed Yong is a British science writer who writes the award-winning blog Not Exactly Rocket Science. His work has appeared in Nature, New Scientist, the BBC, the Guardian, the Times, Wired UK, Discover, CNN, Slate, the Daily Telegraph, the Economist and more. He lives in London with his wife. He has never been impregnated by a botfly but he does rather like ants.

Doomsday Deflected

Planet Killers:  A Spine-Tingling Look at Near Earth Objects, Mass Extinctions, and the Controversial Science of Planetary Defense, by Tad Friend, Byliner Originals, 2011. ($0.99: iTunes, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Google, Sony, Kobo)

            One of the joys of borrowing a stranger’s cabin comes from the serendipity of someone else’s taste in books.  Years ago, in a corner of the hills east of Lake Winnipesaukee, I picked up a Stephen King anthology.  I’ve long since forgotten most of what I read there, but King’s introduction stuck in my mind.  The novella, he wrote, (I paraphrase from battered memory) was not so much a literary form as a kind of writer’s banana republic, a treacherous, alien territory into which innocents pass, never to escape unscathed.  How and when to turn the plot; the number of characters one can develop; the pace; the amount of exposition the piece can tolerate – all these tasks shift as the writer moves from either the expansive canvas of a full book or the utter economy short stories demand.  And until you’ve actually entered into that strange country, Novella, King warned, you have no idea how twisted are its paths.

            Tad Friend dares such dangers in what amounts to a non-fiction novella, Planet Killers, published in the Byliner Originals series.    It tells of the threat posed by crud from space that could strike the earth, and of attempts by a few scientists and engineers to figure out how to dodge such bullets.  That'’s a fine premise, certainly, and of course anything that brings together dinosaurs, great balls of fire, and wild but plausible schemes with names like “gravity tractors” has got all the elements of a riveting read. 

There's a bit of a wobble right at the start, though, as Friend recalls a tequila-fueled milliennial New Year’s Eve spent waiting for sunrise on the Yucatan Peninsula before leaping, abruptly, to the scene  65 million years ago, when it was a skosh more exciting in those parts, what with the dinosaur-destoying asteroid splashing down just offshore. From that rather jolting beginning, we settle into a story built on two pillars: a character sketch of the always enjoyable Rusty Schweikart, the Apollo astronaut, as Friend reports, most likely to show up at a New Age conference; and a loose narrative of a two day meeting by a NASA advisory committee debating strategies for “planetary defense” – basically how to avoid getting whacked by a major earth-crossing asteroid in the future.

Those two threads unreel rather calmly, given that our spines are supposed to be tingled.  Schweickart and his co-conspirators fear that most decisions makers (and everyone else) are simply unaware of the existential threat posed by a major impact, and of the probabilities involved.  Friend detours briefly into a natural history of asteroids and impacts.  We get hints of the science involved – a mention of complex orbits; brief discussions of the technologies that might deflect really big rocks – that gravity tractor, for one, a spaceship that comes to rest close enough to a dangerous rock long enough before any predicted collision to permit the probe’s gravity to nudge the object onto a safe trajectory.  In his best set piece, Friend manages to get inside his hero’s head– capturing Schweickart’s evolution from fighter pilot to save-the-earth crusader, in a process that began on his untethered space walk, when he suddenly felt the fragility of “pale blue dot” below him.  Such anecdotes ornament Friend's reporting on the NASA committee deliberations, which culminate in a modest plan for planetary defense:  spend 3 billion dollars over the next decade; launch a new space telescope designed to detection of potentially dangerous asteroids, and test the most promising couple of non-nuclear deflection technologies. 

That recommendation comes as something of an anti-climax, but that’s par for the course for apocalyptic non-fiction, honestly told:  what can be done is often less thrilling than what may happen if we do nothing.  But the deeper disappointment with Planet Killers comes its own uncertainty about what it wants to be -- and that literary neurosis, in turn, derives from one of the less obvious challenges that come with writing into  e-media.

    That is: Planet Killers is an example of one of the two distinct species of works evolving in the midst of the e-book transformation.  The gaudier one comes with the application of computing to the text.  Think iPad apps, which allow creators to construct works that offer readers the ability to perform actions on and through the words and images of conventional tales.  See, for example, Deborah Blum’s review of The Elements, something of a type-specimen of the form.  From the scribbler’s point of view, app books also entail new models of working that move towards the ways movies are made, in which the writer is only one, and not always the central creative authority.

The other enabling e-technology preserves the author’s pride and power.  Digitization and the ‘net combine to provide plain e-texts with a new channel for publication and distribution of what remain conventional works made up of words and plain images.  The cost of such distribution is effectively zero – and while that’s so obvious it hardly bears noting, it still adds up to a genuinely new opportunity for writers. You may remember that dim, distant past of, say, six or seven years ago, when the length at which a writer could tell a story was fixed by the venue, a few thousand words for a magazine, many more for a book, with almost nothing possible in between.  If you wanted to treat a subject that might not sustain between hard covers, yet offered more richness than could fit into two-pages-plus-the-jump of a magazine…too bad.  

 Now?  The ‘net doesn’t care if it has to gulp down 5,000 words, 10,000, 25,000 -- whatever it takes to do justice to the material at hand. But there’s a catch.  A 15,000 word piece is not simply a magazine feature at three or four times the usual length.  It’s not a baby book either.  Rather, such works demand formal structures of their own, with particular demands of organization, of narrative depth, of pace, and so on.  Before you know it, you’ve drifted across the border that King warned about.  You’ve entered (non-fiction) Novella, and, if you are unwary, it’s terribly easy to wander down the wrong path.

            Which, by the long road home, brings us back to Planet Killers.  The problem?  There just isn’t that much there, there.  Stripped to its narrative scaffold, all you really get are three steps on a short journey:  the book begins with the threat of a big rock falling from the sky.  We learn that some folks are working on it, without gaining any real depth on what those characters actually did to come up with their ideas.  And then we are baldly told that there’s some agreement on an, incomplete response to the challenge. No great obstacles face any of Friend’s people; no event happens within the story that provides any sense of risk or danger; there are no ideas sufficiently developed within the text that yield some thrill, an Aha! that lingers for more than minutes after the last swipe across the screen.  In the end, Planet Hunters reads not like a work written to the length it told its author it needed to be, and much more like a magazine article blown up to the dignity of an independent e-text.

            Thus the fate of the unwary who venture into the Republic of Novella.  The rise of the e-text makes getting there a doddle.  Getting out, though? No easier than it’s ever been.  

Image:  August Müller, The Diary Entry, by 1885.

Tom Levenson writes books (most recently Newton and the Counterfeiter) and makes films, about science, its history, and whatever else catches his magpie's love of shiny bits.  His work has been honored by a Peabody, a National Academies Science Communication and an AAAS Science Journalism Award, among others.  By day he professes at MIT, where he directs the Graduate Program in Science Writing.

 

SMILE: The Astonishing Destructive Power of Positive Thinking

SMILE: The Astonishing Power of a Simple Act, by Ron Gutman. TED Books, 2011. Kindle /Nook / iBookstore

Reviewed by David Dobbs

Sometimes when I encounter writing I especially admire, I like to type it out. Say, Nabokov, in The Luzhin Defense, describing his heroine taking a bath amid marital confusion:

As she immersed herself in the bath she watched the tiny water bubbles gathering on her skin and on the sinking, porous sponge. Settling down up to the neck, she saw herself through the already slightly soapy water, her body thin and almost transparent, and when a knee came just barely out of the water, this round, glistening, pink island was somehow unexpected in its unmistakable corporeality.

I type such passages because it seems they might rub off. So when for some reason the passages I had highlighted in my Kindle version of the book under review here, SMILE: The Astonishing Powers of a Simple Act, did not carry from my reading device to my Amazon Kindle highlights web page, where normally I would be able to select and copy them, I frowned, because this malfunction meant that to show you any passages from this book I would have to re-type them, and I feared, dear reader, and still fear, that they might rub off. I will have to read a lot of Nabokov to make up for this. 

The problem begins with the beginning, where precisely 11% of this e-book, according to my Kindle, is devoted to setting up a punchline that the title has already shouted loud. The author, a Palo Alto entrepreneur named Ron Gutman, who truly does seem like a nice guy, opens by describing a bus ride he once took in Africa. The driver and all Gutman's fellow passengers greet glumly his foreign face, language, and clothing, then leave him sitting alone, isolated on the crowded bus. After a couple hours of this dusty bus ride, and many, many words, he springs his surprise:

I decided to try something different and do something entirely unexpected. It was time to pull out the special power I had learned and brought with me from my interactions with people I had met during my previous travels through Asia and India, when I had connected with people from other cultures who did not speak any of the languages that I do.

I smiled.

I smiled at everyone around me. I smiled indiscriminately, I smiled widely, I smiled continuously. Whether people looked at me or not, I smiled at them. Although no one responded to my smiles, I started to feel better.⁠

 

They do eventually respond, of course, and soon the whole bus is smiling. Thus this book is born:

In the heart of a foreign land, away from development and infrastructure, in a closed environment where I looked and felt like an outsider, stuck in a situation where it seemed I could not talk to or understand others, and in the midst of unusual tension that I could not understand or explain, I became aware of the hidden power of the smile⁠.

 

This smiling reveal may have worked on the bus, and it works, mostly, sort of, in Gutman’s 7-minute TED talk. It does not work on the page. As I seem to remember someone once saying rather cruelly of another writer I'll leave unnamed: What’s important is not new, and what’s new is not important.* And everything is repeated. 

Did you know, for instance, that people everywhere smile? This means smiling is universal. Even more amazing: Your smile not only makes the people you smile at feel better, it makes you feel better too. Also, on a separate page very nearby, even as smiling makes you feel better, it makes others feel better! Or did I say that? Anyway, smiling at people also makes them think that you are both more competent and more friendly than they would think otherwise — and, incredibly, your smile also makes them feel more friendly and competent. Plus better.

This can change things. Indeed, if you think about it, smiles have “incredible transformative powers.” Smiles “can dramatically and quickly change social situations, breaking down barriers while forming connections and fostering happiness.” They can also, even as soon as one paragraph later, “create rapport and a human connection.”

Gutman finds this all astonishing — although he usually says “amazing,” presumably to reserve “astonishing” for the book’s subtitle. He is explicitly amazed, in fact, 12 times. (Beware, authors, the power of the Kindle to count your crutch words.) Overall, I would say, what amazes him most is the smile's astonishing power to make things better. He remarks on this power to make things "better” at least 25 times. It excites him. So he exclaims! Alas, Kindle will not find and count exclamation points. Damn!

Mechanisms emerge. Smiling, Gutman tells us, sets up a feedback loop:

To glaze this donut, Gutman turns to science. He finds many studies but, apparently, few commas. Did you know, for instance, that “in two separate studies examining thousands of pictures taken from 1968 through 1993 and 1970 through 1999 researchers discovered that 55 percent to 60 percent of men and 80 percent of women smile in photos from pleasant public situations”? Me either.

Why do people smile so? Because “smiling makes us feel and look better, both to ourselves and to others.” It was about here that my frown began to turn to fury, for while Gutman had related this fact at least ten times already, I was only, my Kindle cruelly revealed, 62% of the way through the book, which was way too far and hardly far enough. Then, in case I’d forgotten this crucial message while checking my progress, he used the next sentence to tell me an eleventh time.

The glaze accrues. “Under certain conditions, when men see women smile at them they interpret that as a sign that the women think they are attractive.” I would never have guessed. Lest I resist this news, however, Gutman offers a study showing that a women who smiles at male patrons as she enters a bar will get hit on far more often than she would if she simply makes eye contact as she walks in — which to me seems a brave enough thing itself. Same goes in libraries, One researcher, in fact, “ended up marrying one of her test subjects who first approached her because of her smile!" Exclamation point his.

Scan studies too enter the picture, arriving as thin, obvious, inevitable, and alluring as a pharmaceutical sales rep at a doctor's office. One fMRI study, for instance — of 28 moms, which is only a few more than the number of times Gutman mentions this effect — showed that Mommy’s pleasure centers light up when Baby smiles. Other scan studies show that a single smile can bring the brain as much pleasure as 2000 chocolate bars or $25,000. Someone tell the chocolate people they're wildly underpricing. And for me, please hold the smile; I'll take the cash.

What can we do with this information? Gutman offers suggestions. Smile. Smile at strangers. Smile at yourself. Smile the first thing on waking. Smile when you’re skydiving. Smile while you’re giving natural childbirth. Offers one smiley devotee, “I smiled through my natural, drug-free labor and fully believe it transformed the whole experience. I recommend smiling to all women going through childbirth.” I would love to have seen this woman recommend that to my wife as she was being wheeled down the hall for a c-section after 40 hours of labor and 4 hours of pushing. In fact, to test the astonishing power of this recommendation, I just now read it aloud to my wife. Her reaction makes me long to see this woman offer her this advice even now. She wouldn't be smiling when she finished.

I don’t mean to be cruel. I’m actually fairly smiley myself. But this book, which as a TED book is supposed to be about "a powerful idea," is a fatty concoction of neuropop, adventure travel, self-help, California woo, and Palo Alto entrepreneurial gush. It pushes positive thinking across some mathematical warp zone that renders it negative. I suspect it would make even the father of positive thinking, Norman Vincent Peale, just fwow wight up.

But don’t take my word for it. I’ll give Gutman a chance to close the deal. Elipses are his:

So, whenever you want to look great, sociable, and competent, or whenever you want to reduce your stress or improve your marriage, or whenever you want to feel as if you’ve just had a huge stack of high-quality chocolate (without incurring the caloric cost) or as if you’ve just found $25,000 in the pocket of an old jacket you haven’t work for ages…. Or when you want to earn the trust of others so you can change the world for the better…. Or when you just want to help yourself and others around you live longer, healthier happier lives … SMILE.

 

At that I believe I did smile, or at least grimace with relief, for I had finally reached the end.

Roy Scheider's with me on this, by the way:

Thanks, Ed Yong, for the tip on the vid.

 

David Dobbs, the author of The Atavist e-book bestseller My Mother's Lover, writes on science, culture, and sports for publications including The Atlantic, The New York Times Magzine, National Geographic, and Slate. He blogs at WIRED  is now writing his fourth book, The Orchid and the Dandelion. 

The Germ Theory of Cancer

Controlling Cancer: A Powerful Plan for Taking On the World's Most Daunting Disease, by Paul Ewald. TED Books, 2012. (Kindle/Nook/ iBookstore)

There's an inescapability about cancer. It can feel more like fate than a disease. People who smoke can't help but wonder when a cell in their lungs will go rogue and produce a tumor. Living near a toxic dump gives people the sense that someone is playing Russian Roullette with their children, and sooner or later the bullet is going to fire. If you are a woman from a family of breast cancer victims, you can almost hear the clock ticking.

But we must not forget that some cancers are less like fate than they are like the flu. Take cervical cancer. It can't be blamed on bad genes or exposure to chemicals. It's caused by a virus. The human papillomavirus thrives by infecting epithelial cells. It disables their brakes, so that the cells grow faster than normal. To avoid being discovered by the immune system, HPV cloaks host cells so that they appear normal. Most people carry harmless strains of HPV. Your eyelashes are probably coated in them. They don't make the vast majority of their hosts sick because we strike a balance with the viruses. We are constantly shucking off the top layer of epithelial cells from our skin and other surfaces. Infected cells typically don't stick around long enough to cause us trouble. But every now and then, HPV will push a cell on the path to runaway growth and, ultimately, cancer.

Paul Ewald, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Louisville, thinks that we need to let this fact sink in. Most of the research on new cancer treatments goes into searching for ways to blast tumors. This is an expensive strategy that yields relatively little benefit, Ewald argues. Chemotherapy drugs can have awful side effects, and the cancer itself can adapt to the medicine through a nefarious form of natural selection. Mutations that make cancer cells more resistant to the chemotherapy take over the tumor. But if we could stop a significant chunk of cancers in the same way we battle viruses, the fight against cancer may have gotten a whole lot more promising.

In Controlling Cancer, Ewald argues that HPV is far from alone as a cancer-causing pathogen. He points to hepatitis viruses, which are known to cause liver cancer, and the bacteria Helicobacter pylori, which lives in the human stomach and can cause gastic cancer. It stands to reason, Ewald argues, that a lot of the pathogens that make us sick also push us towards cancer. For many viruses, bacteria, protozoans, and animal parasites, it pays to spur cells to replicate quickly and to evade the immune system.

If a lot of cancer is caused by infections, then we may be in a fortunate situation. We can save millions of lives with well-established measures. It doesn't take a miracle drug to block the transmission of hepatitis C, for example. Stopping people from using dirty needles will do just fine. Vaccinations could annihilate some kinds of cancer altogether.

It's a provocative idea, which is par for the course for Ewald. He's long been an advocate for putting medicine on a solid foundation of evolutionary biology. In the 1990s, for example, he came to fame for his ideas about domesticating infectious diseases. The deadliness of a parasite can evolve, and in some situations, it may pay for parasites to be milder instead of meaner. He went on to argue that many supposed chronic diseases--from heart disease to schizophrenia--are triggered by pathogens. Ewald's work has been mostly theoretical--extrapolating from what we know about evolution in general to diseases in particular. His ideas are tough to test, if only because our bodies are so complex. But they have certainly been influential, as scientists have developed better tools for detecting microbes in our bodies and probe their effects on us.

Controlling Cancer is one of the first works published by TED Books--an offshoot of the hugely popular TED talks. (Here's Paul Ewald's 2008 TED talk on domesticating disease.) TED talks are crisp, quick, emphatic, and not too heavy on scientific detail. Their books are, too. Controlling Cancer is a quick read, without any photographs, videos, or other ornaments found on other ebooks. It does include footnotes, where Ewald back up most of his points.

The citations are a good thing, but sometimes it's hard to tell when Ewald citing well-established cases of pathogens causing cancer and when he's only pointing to suggestive hints. The scientific literature is loaded with papers in which researchers describe tumors brimming with viruses. These associations could be evidence of viruses triggering cancer, or they could be evidence that tumors are good places for viruses to breed.

Ewald does point out that this ebook is just a precis of a longer book that's in the works. Controlling Cancer intrigues me enough that I look forward to Ewald making his case in full.

 

Carl Zimmer writes frequently about science for the New York Times and is the author of 13 books, including A Planet of Viruses

[Image: Dividing lung cancer cell/NIH]

A Guided Tour of Hell

Into the Forbidden Zone: A Trip Through Hell and High Water in Post-Earthquake Japan, by William T. Vollmann. Byliner Originals, 2011. (Nook/Google Ebook/Sony eReader/iTunes bookstore/Kindle Single)

Reviewed by Maggie Koerth-Baker

On March 11, 2011, one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded ripped apart a swath of eastern Japan. About an hour later, a huge tsunami wave tore through the wreckage, leaving behind a trail of salinated sludge and a burgeoning nuclear disaster.

You know all of this already, of course. In fact, at this point, the narrative of what happened in Japan—what's still happening, really—has been repeated so many times that you might be tempted to think there's no reason to read yet another take on this situation.

But you should set those thoughts aside. At least, you should set them aside long enough to read William T. Vollmann's Into the Forbidden Zone, a 70-page narrative that tells the beautiful, heartbreaking story about the aftermath of the Tohoku Earthquake and highlights two of the key problems with the way this tragedy has been covered in the popular press.

Vollmann isn't a science journalist. In fact, he's primarily a novelist. If you're looking for a lot of technical details on the science of earthquake prediction, or the real risks of radiation exposure, he can't help you very much.

But, on the other hand, I think that's part of what makes this book so powerful. As someone immersed in the science of news, it's easy to lose track of what an event looks like from any other perspective. As an American, far removed from the actual event, it's easy to get so caught up in seismometers, early warning systems, and debates over nuclear energy—in other words, what could happen to us someday—that we forget about the people all this stuff really did happen to 11 months ago.

Vollmann's book brings the real story—how an earthquake, a tsunami, and a nuclear meltdown have affected the Japanese people—back to the forefront, where it ought to be.