Pets, Prisoners, and Personhood

By: | February 6, 2012

I never imagined that writing a book about cats and dogs would land me in the Boulder County Jail. But there I was on a Friday afternoon in late September, surrounded by 15 inmates in the middle of Cell Block B—and looking for the exit.

At that moment, I was more cold than afraid. The guards had cranked up the AC, and I stood shivering, my arms crossed tightly against my chest. The cell block was large and sterile, with a drab gray floor, chalky cinderblock walls, and round, convex mirrors hinged to every corner. The only color came from thirty dark orange doors that framed the room, each branded with a large white number and harboring two narrow glass slits for windows. At a signal from a guard a few moments earlier, the doors had swung open, and the prisoners emerged from their closet-sized cells, pouring into the middle of the space in which I was standing. One—heavily-tattooed with a bald head, tan skin, and a long, ragged goatee—headed straight for me. He had something in his hand. Continue reading →

The Science of Mysteries: Shock, Trauma, and the First Real War

By: | February 3, 2012

One bright day last December, certain science bloggers who had happily discovered a shared taste for classic mystery writers, all wrote synchronous posts about the science in mystery books.  These books, we thought, have a surprising amount of good science in them.  So we’re doing it again (for titles, see bottom of post).  This post is about Dorothy Sayers’ Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. 

On Armistice Day, some years after the first World War is over, an old general is found dead, sitting in his usual chair by the fire at his club, the Bellona Club.  Oddly, he’s not wearing in his lapel the usual remembrance poppy.  He’s very old though, he must have died naturally; his body is removed from the club and life goes on.  A number of plot developments later, however, he’s found to have been murdered.  The last person to see him alive was his grandson, Captain George Fentiman, who was in the war and who has been mentally and emotionally unbalanced by shell shock.

George Fentiman is still too sick to hold a job, badly needs money, is his grandfather’s beneficiary, and so is the logical suspect in the murder.  He’s an unpleasant character:  he’s bitter about his service to the country, he berates his wife who has to support them both; he’s nervous and jumpy and picks fights for nothing.  These symptoms of shell shock also make him a suspect.  Once he understands this, he takes one of his “queer fits,” disappears for days, and when he returns, confesses to the murder.  He didn’t do it though, and our detective Lord Peter Wimsey knows he didn’t and uses his confession to reveal the real murderer.

Wimsey in fact was also in the war, also has shell shock, and at times of stress, believes he’s back in the trenches.  So Wimsey knows enough to understand what Fentiman is going through and in particular, what he means when he says that his grandfather, the general, may have been in the Crimea, but had no idea of what real war was like. Continue reading →

Life without beer: part 2 of my beer & running science experiment

By: | February 2, 2012

 

The question came to me at 10-something AM in the morning. I had just hurdled a flaming fire pit, the finish line of a stupidly steep trail run in the desolate cliffs of Western Colorado. Now I was drinking a can of cold beer I’d pulled from the race refreshment cooler. And damn, if that beer didn’t taste good.

Some races give out t-shirts. Finishers of this event earned beer koozies emblazoned with the phrase “I survived the Summit and Plummet.”

I’d caught a ride to the event with a dear friend of mine, a former alcoholic. On the drive home, he casually remarked that he used to chug beer like that too, back in his drinking days. His comment was matter-of-fact, not judgmental, yet I found myself wondering if it was time for some self-reflection.

Continue reading →

Even though I no longer plan to be a biologist… (science music part I)

By: | January 31, 2012

Science education amounts to a Great Winnowing — from millions of school kids fascinated by science down to orders of magnitude fewer actually making a living, or a life, doing it decades later. Whatever the reasons so many flee or are pushed out of science — and there are many, both personal and institutional — I’ve always had a fondness for the dropouts.

Over the years, I’ve taught a lot of science students who fall into that category — the ones who are thinking of getting out apparently have a knack for finding me. While cleaning up some old, old files recently, I happened to find evidence of one of the first. I was a PhD student teaching intro biology. In a quiz, I asked about the Michaelis Menten relationship. One student answered with, “I have no clue … Continue reading →

Humanity Under Attack: The Story of Morgellons

By: | January 30, 2012

In 2001, Mary Leitao noticed something odd: a fiber poking out of an irritated patch of skin on her two-year-old son’s lip. In the weeks to come, more fibers emerged. Leitao examined them under the light of her RadioShack microscope, but she couldn’t figure out what they were. So she turned to the internet. There she found a community of people who seemed to be suffering from a similar condition. Leitao was worried. But she couldn’t convince physicians to take her seriously. So she took matters into her own hands. Leitao created a new disease and dubbed it Morgellons. She launched the Morgellons Research Foundation. Then, in 2006, she organized a media campaign.

Morgellons disease received so much attention that, in 2008, the CDC agreed to conduct an investigation into the “unexplained skin condition, commonly referred to as Morgellons.” On January 25, the journal PLoS One published the results. The researchers found no link to any infectious or environmental agent. “Most sores appeared to result from chronic scratching and picking, without an underlying cause,” the authors write. The fibers? Likely cotton from the patients’ clothing or sheets.

Continue reading →

A Reason to Stay

By: | January 27, 2012

There’s nothing like a stagnating job search to make you question your calling in life. I’ve been staring at the title “science journalist” for a couple of months now, and every time the words look more alien to me. The fact is, though I have a passionate interest in making science accessible to the public – who pay for much of it, after all, and should reap the benefits in understanding – I have to face mounting evidence that science itself is of limited interest to me.

Sacrilege! Who dedicates themselves to a poorly-compensated career in a field they aren’t at least mildly obsessed with? And why, if I’m supposed to be specializing in science am I so jazzed about writing a book on mixed martial arts concurrently with another one on financial psychology? Am I cursed with generalitis?

A rowdy debate down the pub with my dearly beloved cousin Jonathan answered my question in the negative this evening. As with so many interests, mine does not fall in the categorized subject fields of academic departments but rather on a plane cross-sectioning them all at a certain angle. Do bear in mind that I just got back from the pub.

Continue reading →

When is it time to revise our story?

By: | January 26, 2012

Today’s post began with a social media status update by my friend Paolo Bacigalupi. Paolo wrote:

At what point does a “drought” become an “arid climate?”

Paolo posed his question months ago, and at first glance, it seemed like nothing more than a jab at Texan politicians like Rick Perry, who deny climate change even as evidence for it accumulates in their own backyards.

But my mind has circled back to Paolo’s question because it touches on so much more than just rainfall in the Southwest. It’s also about the scientific process, the line between data and interpretation and the role of story in science. Continue reading →