The Loom » Book Preview

Discovering my microbiome: “You, my friend, are a wonderland”

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 15:09:59 +0000

Some people get a thrill from getting their genome sequenced and poring through the details of their genes. I’m a bit off-kilter, I guess, because I’m more curious about the genomes of the things living in my belly button. And let me tell you: it’s a jungle in there.

I first became curious about my navel in January. I was in Durham, North Carolina, to attend a meeting, and as I walked out of a conference room I noticed a cluster of people in the lobby handing out swabs. They were asking volunteers to stick the swabs in their belly button for the sake of science. Our bodies are covered with microbes, and scientists are discovering weirdly complex patterns to their biodiversity. From fingers to elbows to chin to forehead, different regions of our skin are dominated by different combinations of species. But the bellybutton remained terra incognita.

I happily donated my microbiome to the study, which is being conducted by Jiri Hulcr and Andrea Lucky, two post-doctoral researchers in the laboratory of Rob Dunn at North Carolina State University. After a few weeks, Hulcr sent me a photo ...

Great science books for high school students: The hive-mind speaks

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 21:31:41 +0000

Over the weekend, I was contacted by Melissa Townsend, an Arizona high school teacher, with this question:

Getting ready to assign spring reading to my students. What are your favorite non-fiction science books a HS kid can handle?

It’s an excellent question–there are some books that can open up the mind of a teenager, and leave an impression that lasts a lifetime. But when I got Townsend’s request, I was traveling to Washington to talk on a panel about blogging, so I was a bit scatter-brained. I therefore tossed the question out to the hive mind. When I read the responses, many of them made me think, “Yeah, what she said!”

Here is a selection of the answers. Add your own in the comment thread; I can update the list here accordingly.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot. (This one was mentioned so often Townsend decided to go with it.)

Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, by Stephen Jay Gould

The Diversity of Life, by Edward O. Wilson

Under a Lucky Star, by Roy Chapman Andrews

The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of ...

Henrietta Lacks and the Future of Science Books

Carl Zimmer — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 05:32:58 +0000

I first met the writer Rebecca Skloot about eight years ago. She had been working on a book for a couple years and running late. The idea was brilliant, though, so I hoped she’d be able to get it done before too long. Many scientists who study human cell biology use a special line of cells known as HeLa. It came from a woman named Henrietta Lacks, who died of cervical cancer in 1951. Skloot was writing about Lacks, her family, and the way her body became dispersed around the world.

When I would see Skloot again, I’d ask how the book was going. Still going. After a while, I stopped asking, because I know how irritating that question can get when the answer hasn’t budged for a while. When the book was done, it would be done.

A decade passed before the book was done. When Skloot sent me an advance copy of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks a few months ago, I discovered why it had taken so long. She doggedly pursued the story, reconstructing a fifty-year saga intertwining the experience of a family struggling ...

Congratulations to the Age of Wonder [Book Preview]

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 16:49:38 +0000

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, by Richard Holmes, has won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books. I haven’t read it, nor is its galleys sitting atop a stack of books I hope to get to. But it does look awfully good, and the Royal Society obviously agrees…Any Loom readers have a review to offer?

Update: I should really have entitled this, Congratulations, Richard Holmes. Books don’t appreciate good wishes very much.

Book [P]review: For The Scientist

Carl Zimmer — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 04:44:50 +0000

On August 11, 1999–ten years ago tomorrow–the State Board of Education in Kansas voted to take evolution out of the state’s science curriculum.

This came as quite a shock to a lot of biologists I spoke to at the time. A lot of them couldn’t understand how it have happened. Some decided to get together to plan what to do in response. With lightning-fast reflexes, a meeting was arranged over a year later. Representatives from major scientific societies gathered to make a plan. They invited a number of other people to join them. I was one. And, frankly, I felt like I was observing a meeting of representatives of tribes from some New Guinea highland forest, who were following rules and speaking a language that I could not begin to understand. At the end of the meeting, these dozens of scientists made a momentous decision. They would…wait for it…go back to their societies and suggest that they post on their web site a statement that evolution is good science.

I sat there, gob-smacked, wondering exactly how many people actually visit, say, the American Phytopathological Society. And yet everyone at the meeting seemed so happy, so excited that they had really done something–that ...

Book (P)review #1: Life Ascending, The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:54:37 +0000

Last month, I asked you how to handle the ever-growing pile of science books I receive (before I donate most of them to the library, of course). A plurality of you voted in favor of frequent thumbnail descriptions, rather than alternatives like the less frequent all-out review. That’s a relief, because that was my own preference. So let me pull off the top book from the pile, Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution by Nick Lane.

The reason it’s on the top is that it happened to be very useful to me right now with an article I’m working on (more on that next month). Lane has selected a handful of key features of the natural world, from DNA to sex to warm-bloodedness to consciousness, and has written a chapter about each, explaining what we understand about it and how it evolved. The list is, as Lane himself admits, a bit arbitrary, and on first inspection it may give off a whiff of Scala Naturae, arranging life on a ladder from lower to higher. But once you delve into Lane’s writing, those minor qualms will evaporate. ...