The Best American Science Writing 2008 |  | Authors: Sylvia Nasar, Jesse Cohen
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Category: Book
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Media: Paperback
Pages: 336
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Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.3 x 1
ISBN: 0061340413
Dewey Decimal Number: 808
EAN: 9780061340413
ASIN: 0061340413
Publication Date: September 1, 2008
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Product Description
Edited by Sylvia Nasar, bestselling author of A Beautiful Mind and former economics correspondent for the New York Times, The Best American Science Writing 2008 brings together the premiere science writing of the year. Distinguished by the foremost voices and publicationsâamong them Pulitzer Prize-winner Amy Harmon, Nobel Prize-winner Al Gore, and award-winning and bestselling author Oliver Sacksâthis anthology is a comprehensive overview of our most advanced and most relevant scientific inquiries.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 9
 Delightful September 19, 2008
The Spinozanator (Waco, Texas)
19 out of 23 found this review helpful
I anxiously await the publication of this annual edition and the 2008 version does not disappoint. The guest editor this year (Sylvia Nasar - "A Beautiful Mind") picks which articles she thinks are the best and the selections reflect her interests. Whether you consider it good or bad, there is not a single hard science article. The selections are heavy on medicine, psychiatry, psychology, and the pharmaceutical industry. For a guaranteed good time - grab a copy, curl up, and enjoy yourself.
Amy Harmon - *one of my favorites - Would you want to know if you had the gene that led to an inheritable disease that was both physically and mentally crippling? The subject of this essay is a young woman whose grandfather died of Huntington's chorea.
Richard Preston - Lesch-Nyhan syndrome - so rare that one of the researchers knows almost every individual on earth that has been diagnosed. Those afflicted show dramatically the link between a single genetic mutation and aberrant behavior.
Thomas Goetz - Start-up companies that evaluate and interpret your DNA.
Carl Zimmer - Women in the US have a 39% chance of being diagnosed with cancer. Men have a 45% chance, and evolutionary biologists assure us they are not about to find a cure.
Tara Parker-Pope - NIH misread the hormone study of 2002. Women who use hormones to treat menopausal symptoms do not increase their risk of heart attacks or strokes. Their long-term health outlook may even improve.
Gardiner Harris, Benedict Carey, & Janet Roberts (two articles)- *another of my favorites - Pharmaceutical companies have figured out a legal way to influence psychiatrists to recommend their drugs for off-label use in pediatric patients with supposed bi-polar disease. They pay them. Having been a drug representative and subsequently a doctor, this article rings true to my experience.
Daniel Carlet - *another of my favorites - A psychiatrist recounts his experience hawking drugs part-time for Wyeth - making an easy $30,000.
Tina Rosenberg - *another of my favorites - Doctors who deal with chronic pain patients may be putting their own futures at risk. The nature of the work attracts the attention of medical boards and even district attorneys. This well-meaning (but disorganized) doctor is serving 30 years in the pokey.
Jerome Groopman - The diagnosis of bi-polar disorder in children has increased since 1990 more than fourfold, to the delight of - and with the help of - the pharmaceutical industry. Is it real or a fad? Are the benefits of treatment worth the risk of serious side effects?
Sally Satel - Who is going to get that coveted organ? Choosing "is not playing God; that is playing man - the all-too-human affair of people deliberating strenuously and in good faith to determine what is right." Maybe - just maybe - we should rescind that law against paying kidney donors.
Oliver Sacks - Clive had encephalitis in his mid-forties. He lost his ability to remember anything from one minute to the next. Everything happens to him as if it had never happened before - with two exceptions. He can still play and conduct beautiful music (which requires memory) and he still knows he loves his wife.
Ben McGrath - People used to feel luck if they got a peg leg after an amputation. Today's artificial limbs, however, are things bordering on science fiction.
Margaret Talbot - *another of my favorites - How do you spot a liar? Jurors certainly can't figure it out, and polygraph "lie detectors" are only in the 90% range of accuracy - not good enough for court use, but better than juries. What about fMRI - brain scanning? The kinks have certainly not been worked out, as this fascinating article points out.
Stephen Hall - *another of my favorites - What makes a person wise? It's not just age, although that might help, to a point.
Al Gore - A short inspirational essay with recommendations as to where we go from here.
Jim Yardley - One of two essays about China's burgeoning self-induced environmental nightmare. This one is the overall view.
Joseph Kahn - The other essay about China's capitalistic excess at the expense of it's environment. Kahn profiles one man who crusaded against pollution of the area lake. He is now in jail. If you think US corporations are polluters, take a look at this!
John Seabrook - *another of my favorites - The planet's ultimate safeguard against global famine is a seed bank containing unaltered seeds from all over the world. This comprehensive article covers facts about seeds, agriculture, genetically modified foods, seed-banks, and the politics thereof - that you wouldn't think you would be so interested in. I'll bet you won't be able to put this one down.
As usual, a brilliant collection.
inheriting fatal diseases(pre-existing conditions ?) February 10, 2010
E. T. Dumiru (Austin TX)
From the author of "A Beautiful Mind" this collection of significant advances in knowledge illuminates the collision of human health and corporate "voice". Woody Guthry and Sergey Brin put human faces on Huntingtons and Parkinsone ( and maybe Ronald Reagan on Alzheimers ? )
In the ensuing 2 years, the development of new tools for research has made Pre-implantation DNA testing possible for the prevention of Huntingtons births, so young parents need not forego having their own disease-free offspring
The 23and Me.com story is evolving, with a very significant engagement by Sergey Brin ( inventor of Google's search engine). Thanks to his wife, he now knows that his Mother's Parkinsons Disease (G2019S) is an autosomal dominant, and equally inherited by Berbers in North Africa and Ashkenazi jews ( Sergey was born in Moscow )
Thanks to Sergey, an anonymous data-base of 10,000 Parkinsons patients (at 23andMe.com) is now collecting the medical histories needed to discover the rules for Parkinsons beyond the DNA story ( eg herbicides Manganese, Agent Orange, etc )
I hope the 2011 edition of this book will carry a similar story of hope for Alzheimers
Personal note ,we have Both diseases (PD and Alz ) in our family.
 Same great stuff, but could have been more varied. March 11, 2009
Julee Rudolf (Oak Harbor, WA USA)
As usual, this year's editor has put together an excellent collection of Science Writing. But the thing I tend to like about the series is that it contains a little bit on a lot of subjects. Not so this time. The stories generally fall into four categories: genetics, ethics/exposé, the brain, and the environment.
Genetics: The first, Facing Life with a Lethal Gene is, unforgettably, about a girl who chooses to learn her genetic fate. The second, An Error in the Code, concerns a genetic defect that causes persons to tear themselves apart, while the third explains the benefits and limitations of the work done by genetic testing companies. In the ethics/exposé category falls six stories: How NIH Misread Hormone Study in 2002; Psychiatrists, Children, and Drug Industry's Role; What's Normal ["the controversy in diagnosing bipolar disorder in the very young"]; After Sanctions, Doctors Get Drug Company Pay; Dr. Drug Rep; When Is a Pain Doctor a Drug Pusher?; and Supply, Demand, and Kidney Transplants. Those involving the brain include: The Abyss [a man whose brain can not lay down memories], Duped [lie detection], and The Older-and-Wiser Hypothesis [Does wisdom increase with age?]. In the final, environment, category are four essays: a five pager by Al Gore on (what else) Global Warming, two about China (1 - the country is running out of water, 2 - a whistle-blower tried to sound the alarm on chemical factories' poisoning of a lake and suffered the consequences), and, finally, Sowing for Apocalypse, which I'd read elsewhere, about a Noah's Arkian collection of seeds from all over the world, kept safe in case of a cataclysmic event on earth. You see, only one piece, about the loss of effectiveness of the human body's evolution-related defenses against cancer, entitled Evolved for Cancer?, doesn't fit my categories. In summary, I'd like to say to next year's editor, more variety, please! Also good: A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar, The Best American Science and Nature Writing Series, and Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder.
A disappointingly narrow selection November 2, 2008
David M. Giltinan (San Francisco)
27 out of 27 found this review helpful
In a series that's usually reliably interesting and intellectually stimulating, this year's collection was somewhat disappointing, due to an unusually narrow focus. In her introduction, Sylvia Nasar tells us that she gravitated to the stories that "people were talking about". An idiosyncratic interpretation of the criterion "best", and it shows. The articles in this book come from -
The New York Times : 9
The New Yorker : 6
The Wall Street Journal : 1
Wired : 1
Scientific American : 1
Policy Review : 1
Biomedical research : 15
The environment : 4
Based on this collection, one would be led to believe that there was nothing of note during the past year in - for example - astronomy, physics, chemistry, mathematics, computer science, oceanography, marine biology, economics, game theory, artificial intelligence, or nanotechnology.
One can only wish that Ms Nasar had cast a broader net in deciding what to include in this volume.
That said, the articles, by such established science writers as Jerome Groopman, Oliver Sacks, Stephen S. Hall, Richard Preston, Amy Harmon, Carl Zimmer, and Tara Parker-Pope, are interesting and well-written. Ms Harmon's piece on living life with the gene for Huntington's disease is exceptional. One might argue that, with four articles beating up on the pharmaceutical industry, coverage in that area could have been a little more balanced.
In summary, the articles included in this anthology are interesting and worth reading. However, anyone who subscribes to The New Yorker and The New York Times will find little new in this disappointingly narrow selection.
Weak March 7, 2009
Michael Oren (Bend, OR)
Too much focus on genetic/health issues. With all the amazing things going on in science, I would have expected a broader group of topics. That said, the stories presented were well written, with the possible exception of Al Gore's article.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 9
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