Violent metaphors

I don’t do very many book reviews, but I jumped at the opportunity when the New York Times recently asked me to review Carl Zimmer’s new book “She has her mother’s laugh: The powers, perversions, and potential of heredity.”* As I was very familiar with Carl’s science writing, I had high expectations as I began reading, and he definitely exceeded them. This is a delightful monster of a book; 500+ pages that roam through subjects as diverse as Tasmanian devils’ facial tumors, CRISPR’d mosquitoes, and the legal system of property inheritance in ancient Rome. The theme connecting all these stories is our conception of heredity: what does it actually mean in an age of gene editing and surrogacy? (the title suggested for my review by my editor).

 

I found this subject personally fascinating, because I was able to connect with it strongly from the perspective of a new mother. Here is an excerpt from my review:

“She Has Her Mother’s Laugh” challenges our conventional wisdom about heredity, especially as we enter the new realms of surrogate pregnancy and gene editing. One of the most astonishing insights is that mothers don’t just pass traits to their children — they receive them as well. I read Zimmer’s book (occasionally out loud) while feeding my baby son. Like Zimmer, I had genetic counseling and my partner and I experienced the same anxieties as he did. But unlike Zimmer, I was able to assuage our fears using a drop of my own blood. That’s because my baby’s DNA, floating freely in my bloodstream, could be tested for hundreds of genetic disorders at an early point in my pregnancy. We took great comfort in the test, without realizing all of its implications. The baby wasn’t just sharing his genetic secrets during the pregnancy. Fetal cells can persist for years after birth; as I sit and write these sentences, I may very well be a chimera: a mixture of some of my son’s cells and my own. This microchimerism may even have eventual effects on my health, although it isn’t fully understood. And he may carry some of my immune cells, too.

I knew a bit about post-pregnancy microchimerism before reading this, but there’s a ton of details that I was unaware of, and now I want to go read the whole literature on the subject. Here’s a quote from the book that just astonished me:

“Fetal cells don’t simply migrate around their mothers’ bodies. They sense the tissue around them and develop into the same type of cells. In 2010, Gerald Udolph, a biologist in Singapore, and his colleagues documented this transformation with a line of engineered mice. they altered the Y chromosomes in the male mice so they glowed with the addition of a chemical. Udolph and his colleagues bred the mice, and then later they dissected the brains of the mothers. They found that the fetal cells from their sons reached into their brains, sprouted branches, and pumped out neurotransmitters. Their sons helped shape their thoughts.”

!!!!!

Even if that’s not been established as occurring in humans as well, that is really incredible.

Another major focus of the book that’s perhaps even more important from a social perspective was its treatment of the complex topics of heredity, biological race, and eugenics.  In this regard, I think that it’s a much better book than most that I’ve read on the subject, up there with Adam Rutherford’s “A brief history of everyone who ever lived”. It’s accessible without sacrificing accuracy, contextualizing the science with history and nuance.

This book is Zimmer at his best: obliterating misconceptions about science with gentle prose. He brings the reader on his journey of discovery as he visits laboratory after laboratory, peering at mutant mosquitoes and talking to scientists about traces of Neanderthal ancestry within his own genome. Any fan of his previous books or his journalism will appreciate this work. But so, too, will parents wishing to understand the magnitude of the legacy they’re bequeathing to their children, people who want to grasp their history through genetic ancestry testing and those seeking a fuller context for the discussions about race and genetics so prevalent today.

Here’s a link to my full review: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/books/review/she-has-her-mothers-laugh-carl-zimmer.html

If you’re looking for some stimulating reading this summer, I highly recommend it!

 

 

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*I’m posting this a bit late because the moment I finished writing the review I had to turn to developing my online summer course. Now I have a bit more breathing room, and time to blog more!

We closed 2017 with some actual good news: the W.H.O. reported that measles deaths in 2016 worldwide fell to an all time low of 89,780.  According to the New York Times, “the decline — a public health triumph, as measles has long been a leading killer of malnourished children — was accomplished by widespread donor-supported vaccination that began in the early 2000s.”

This is fantastic news! But unfortunately the NYT chose to illustrate their article with yet another photo of a terrified child being held down by two adults, one of whom is jamming a needle into his arm.

As many of us repeatedly point out on twitter, these photos provoke fear and mistrust rather than convey a positive message about vaccination.

As new parents ourselves, we are now intimately acquainted with the terror that goes along with suddenly being responsible for a precious new life. We question and second guess every decision we make about play, feeding, clothing, childcare and traveling. It doesn’t matter that we know rationally how adaptable children are—the emotions take over.

One decision we don’t question is our choice to vaccinate our child Ox (not what it says on his birth certificate) on time and according to schedule. We’d actually been looking forward to his two-month pediatrician appointment, because after he received his shots we would feel much better about our upcoming holiday travels.

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It’s been a little while since I’ve updated this blog! I’ve spent all summer working extremely hard to get some academic writing done before our new baby arrives (he’s doing great, and due on Monday!). But although I’ve been fairly quiet here at Violent Metaphors, I’ve been doing some things elsewhere and I thought I should do a quick end-of-summer roundup of everything in one place.

I’ve been writing once a month or so about genetics and archaeology over at The Guardian’s science blog The Past and the Curious along with a fantastic team of archaeologists (my posts are archived here). If you’re interested in human history/prehistory, do check out our blog! That’s where most of my genetics/arch posts are going to be going in the future, with the science literacy/conspiracy theory/vaccine stuff staying here.

My archaeologist colleague Professor Fred Sellet and I were recently interviewed by Ira Flatow about North American prehistory on a live show of Science Friday. Getting to be on a science program that I’ve listened to for over a decade was one of the highlights of the year for me (although there are some things I wish I’d said differently/more clearly in retrospect. It turns out that it’s incredibly nerve-wracking to do a show in front of a large audience, and I could definitely use more practice!).

Finally, I was delighted to be on Tides of History, an incredibly cool history podcast by Patrick Wyman. Patrick’s not only an incredibly smart historian, he’s also my go-to guy for boxing and MMA analysis. Definitely give him a follow on Twitter if you are interested in either of these subjects!

That’s about it for now…I’m working on a series of posts about vaccinating as a brand-new parent, and the first should be up here in a couple of days, so keep an eye on this space!

 

 

This will be a relatively short post, updating my series about the ConspiraSea Cruise and the people I met there. For those who haven’t read it, the cruise was a week-long conference for conspiracy theorists. One of the speakers was Sean David Morton, who claimed he could teach people to stop paying taxes, win any court case, and make money by creating esoteric financial instruments. Eighteen months later, he’s been convicted of tax fraud and issuing false financial instruments. And on Monday, he skipped his sentencing hearing and became a fugitive.

Sean, if you’re reading this, call a lawyer. Please. You tried your legal theories in court and they failed, just like they’ve always failed every time anyone has ever tested them in court. They haven’t worked. They don’t work. They won’t ever work. I know you don’t want to hear this from a skeptic and a critic, but I think you also know it’s the best thing you can do for yourself and your family. Call a lawyer, and get some expert advice. They’re going to tell you to turn yourself in, and you should. It’s the best way to get ahead of this situation.

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I have a new blog on archaeology out over at The Guardian’s science page, where I’m contributing a piece about once a month on archaeology and biological anthropology. As I write things there, I’ll link to them here for interested readers. Here’s an excerpt:

Napoleon’s Russian campaign of 1812 was marked by terrible logistical disaster and resulted in profound loss of life within his own army. Although his forces reached Moscow, they found the city abandoned and burning—a deliberate tactic on the part of the Russian army to prevent the French soldiers from finding provisions.

The practice of requiring soldiers to “live off the land” to supplement their rations likely contributed a great deal to this loss of life. This rendered them extremely vulnerable to the Russians’ scorched earth tactics which left them little to forage or steal. But Napoleon’s Grande Armée was ethnically and socially heterogeneous. Were their origins, social status, and access to food during this time of deprivation reflected in their diet? This is one of the questions that Holder et al. set out to address in their new paper, Reconstructing diet in Napoleon’s Grand Army using stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis.

You can read the rest of my discussion of this paper at  The Past and the Curious.