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Schizophrenia Finds Its Virgil

2013-12-05T12:02:43-08:00

Speaking To My Madness: How I Searched For Myself In Schizophrenia. By Roberta Payne. Kindle and print-on-demand.

Reviewed by Thomas Levenson

Roberta Payne, a polylingual scholar and translator has just published her first book of prose, Speaking To My Madness. It is remarkable, wonderful, absolutely worth your attention.

The book is, most simply, a memoir of a life lived in contention with that singular disease of the mind: schizophrenia. Payne leaps (in fine classical style), in medias res, opening her account at what she tells us is the midpoint of her odyssey through her pathologies, speaking from within a locked ward for the mentally ill in Ames, Iowa. She writes:

"My meds had not yet kicked in for the night. I stood in bare feet in the middle of the floor and looked at the beds, the mirror, the window. The air around me curled up at the edges. It laughed at the fear spurting in my chest, just as the Evil Ones spurted through the night on their way to their own galaxy.” [Italics in the original]

That brief passage conveys one of Payne’s great strengths: transforming feeling — terror, often — into vivid prose. From that in-the-midst-of-it opening at Ames, Payne steps backwards to the year she spent in a master’s program at Stanford, when she disintegrated severely enough to wind up in hospital for the first time. Her description of that crisis sets the tone for much of the first half of the book:

I drove home. On Palm Drive, while I was listening to rock on the radio, I felt my mind change. I was aware of the same things – palm trees, bicycle riders, cars -- but they were all far away and magical. “MacArthur Park” lasted all the way home. It had a weird, doomsday authority over me. I felt fragile. Then I felt hot pain rise through my chest and spread out through my veins, just as it did when I drank at night. Right on the edge of panic.

When I got home, I went and lay down on the grass under the hot sun and submitted to the pain. I couldn’t move until it got cool late that afternoon.

I went into my little cottage and sat down on the sofa.

Huge, invisible razor blades were attacking my eyes horizontally.

My body shook all over.

I wanted to kill myself. Almost. In my mind I went right to that edge and knew that I wanted to try to kill myself but be found while I was still alive.

But someone had to find out how bad it was. Somebody had to know. Before nightfall. The night poised before me promised full-assault fear. There was no way I could get through that night.

Unbelievably, Liz, an old roommate of mine, knocked at my door, opened it herself, and came in. Blood was spurt-spurting crimson from my arm.

I cringed for doing that to her.

Payne’s story goes down hill from there. We follow her as she pursues the opportunities her clearly formidable mind opens up: graduate studies at Harvard; mastery of language after language (Italian, ancient Greek, medieval Greek, Latin…), Ph.D work at the University of Denver. We wince, and then grieve, as at each stop, panic, depression, fear, alcohol — buckets and buckets of booze — and then full-blown schizophrenia derail this voice, this marvelous, literate voice at once narrating and living the train wreck unfolding across the page.

We learn about the pain of her childhood home, populated by a mother presented initially as uncaring, harsh, terrifying, a distant and uncomprehending father, a sister who, as the book proceeds, is revealed to be almost utterly without empathy — or perhaps better, as thoroughly terrified of whatever existential challenge Payne’s illness seems to embody. Payne describes in detail what happens as her schizophrenia advances, to the point where, in the hospital ward in Ames with which the book opens, she edges toward suicide…and then pulls back.

The second half of the book takes up what comes after her halt at the point of self-murder. It’s a very long way back — years, decades of painstaking, painful, courageous and ultimately successful labor, advanced with the help of modern pharmacology, persistent and sensitive talk therapy, AA, the rooted kindness of an admirable pair of Episcopalian clergy, and, in one of Payne’s most subtly framed challenges to expectations raised earlier in her narrative, the love and care of parents who had seemed near-villainous in the early passages of the book.

By now what Payne’s disease has taken from her is so apparent, so empathetically available, that I found myself rooting for her at every turn — and terribly fearful that something terrible might happen as I flipped each page. But this latter story is one of renewal. As Payne climbs out of the dark years she shows without saying what the reader can clearly recognize as the evidence of her strength, her capacity for restitution, for kindness and restitution and forgiveness. The Roberta Payne who emerges through the final hundred pages of the book is someone it becomes a privilege to know, and one whose virtues make what her illness stole from her the more terrible.

This is supposed to be a review-site for works on science and related fields, so let me switch gears for a moment to say what else Payne achieves here: her story amounts to a case study in the advances achieved over the last half century in the understanding and treatment of serious mental illness. At the beginning of that period and in the early days of Payne’s troubles, talk, persuasion, some righting of wrong thoughts were seen as the royal road to treatment (at least for someone in Payne’s circumstances — educated, ferociously intelligent, articulate and, as a Stanford student, an ex-officio member of the elite). Each of her various crises were, at least initially, seen as discrete problems — depression in one pocket, alcoholism in another and so on. Ultimately, she achieved a clear and — for her — appropriate diagnosis, began to receive medication that over time became properly suited to her particular chemistry and physiology, and was able to return to the world supported be an infrastructure of therapeutic and social support. What gets her and keeps her out of her madness was not available to her, to anyone, in the tie when she first fell ill. Payne shows what that means with utter, brutal, and ultimately relieving detail.

Throughout both her descent into Hades and her return, Payne tests a claim she makes to one of her doctors midway through the book: that one can’t convey the experience of schizophrenia in words. Of course, she’s right. It is impossible to give the full experience of any interior state, any landscape, anything but words in words. Writers represent reality. We don’t replicate it, anymore than the painted illusion of three dimensional space in Raphael’s School of Athens is anything more than a flat depiction, blobs of color on a plane. We can’t experience Payne’s disease, no matter how well she writes about it.

And yet, she’s wrong. Speaking to My Madness is much more than a memoir, though its a very fine remembrance indeed. It is a meditation on how life may be lived. In describing as clearly as she has what schizophrenia did to her and what she has done to live with, through, and beyond it, Payne has conveyed a four dimensional human experience. It’s not the same as being there, of course, but the book evokes imagination; it compels an attempt at empathy. I think it would please the classicist in her (I hope it does) to say that what she has done here is a thoroughly compelling display of mimesis — the art of description that, despite its necessary incompleteness, powerfully conveys the meaning of the whole. Payne is simply a formidably skilled writer.

It’s that skill that gives power to a proposition that Payne makes explicitly about two thirds of the way through the work: that psychosis, for all the pain and terror involved, is yet “a deeply enriching experience” as Payne put it, borrowing the phrase from some unremembered earlier reading. The person writing the book, the voice we hear, is so compelling, so much a companion, that it seems that, yes, Payne’s illness must have given her something, sensitivity, heightened feeling, whatever.

That’s a comfort that doesn’t survive her telling. Reporting a conversation with her dearest friend she writes: ”you don’t grow through schizophrenia … It’s a fucking impediment and a waste of a lifetime.” That seems right — and Payne is writer enough to give that conclusion an air of necessity. The fabric of her story, the utter courage with which she describes her worst days, makes it impossible to sustain the illusion that her terrors compensated her in any real measure. Anyone who’s suffered through the kinds of wretchedness Payne documents, or anyone who’s watched someone they love do so, knows the costs involved.

But even so, there is a reward, scant comfort to those afflicted, that comes for those of us invited to listen to Roberta Payne’s madness. By the time she arrives at her resting point, speaking with a beloved companion, in the midst of a beauty her brain allows her to recognize, having mastered thought and feeling and the language needed to express both, Payne has delivered this marvelous book. Her readers’ lives, if not her own, are undisputedly better for it.

The shorter:

I loved this book. I’m sure it has flaws, and I could probably meditate a bit and offer the usual reviewers caveats about this or that. But every now and then one comes across a writer, a voice, a text that lights up what’s involved in being human. Roberta Payne is such a writer. Speaking to My Madness is such a work.

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.

The New World of Legal Highs

2013-11-13T06:57:00-08:00

Uncontrolled Substances: How The Chemical Underground is Going Mainstream. By Mike Power. Matter, Kindle Single, $.99.

Reviewed by Maia Szalavitz

I've been reading and writing about drugs and addiction for over a quarter century (yikes!) so I'm somewhat curmudgeonly in this area: what's news to many isn't likely to be so to me, and even the most egregious errors can only enrage you a certain number of times before you develop, unfortunately, at least some degree of tolerance.

But Mike Power's new Matter ebook, Uncontrolled Substances, is different.

Power avoids both the clichés and the errors, delivering a compelling story about a genuinely new development in the drugs world: the advent of so-called "legal highs." These are new synthetic substances similar to illegal drugs that are sold over-the-counter at head shops and convenience stories, often winkingly labeled as apparently innocuous products like "bath salts" or "plant food."

Often never even tested first on animals, the drugs are typically manufactured in Chinese factories and distributed globally via the internet. They range from marijuana-like products to those aimed at mimicking psychedelics or stimulants.

Power takes us into the story in several ways: by describing the difficulties faced by E.R. doctors dealing with overdoses and bad reactions to the substances, by telling the stories of key chemists, and by seeking to have a Chinese company produce a sample of a stimulant once taken legally by the Beatles, John F. Kennedy, Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe that was pulled from the market in 1971. Power weaves these elements together seamlessly, while describing the difficulties that the new substances present to public health and regulators.

Synthetic drugs reveal a fundamental flaw in the foundation of the current international drug control regime, which is its irrationality. It is impossible to make a scientific case for a system that makes cigarettes and alcohol legal for recreational use, some opioids legal in some places for pain relief, and marijuana completely illegal. This means there are no objective criteria in existing law for determining which of the new drugs should be legal and which should not be.

Regulators have tried to address the problem by banning "chemical analogues" of illegal drugs, but this, again, runs into science: drugs that are structurally similar can have very different effects, and drugs that are completely dissimilar structurally can be pharmacologically alike. Simply banning every new drug as it appears also runs into issues with pharma: prohibit willy-nilly and you may unwittingly be blocking cures for cancer, Alzheimer's or depression.

As Power notes, even the hardliners at the United Nations Office of Drug Control Policy admitted in their World Drug Report this year that the system is "floundering" in its attempts to deal with the problem: one in 12 adults worldwide has at least tried one of the drugs.

Uncontrolled Substances offers a fascinating introduction to the issue--but it may, like many drugs, leave you craving more. In this case, however, I highly recommend it!

[Disclosure: I am writing a forthcoming ebook for Matter, with a different editor]

Maia Szalavitz is a neuroscience journalist for TIME.com and other publications. She is author, most recently of Born for Love: Why Empathy is Essential—and Endangered , with Bruce Perry, M.D. Ph.D. Her next book, Unbroken Brain, will examine addiction as a developmental disorder.

Get Out Your Monocle! Exploring the Past in the Public Domain

2013-10-28T05:38:00-07:00

Switzerland, by Sir Frank Fox.

Originally published by Adam and Charles Black in 1914. Published by Project Gutenberg for Kindle and in other file types. Free.

Reviewed by Veronique Greenwood

If you limit yourself to reading just the ebooks available for free on the internet, as I have been doing lately, you wind up inhabiting the world prior to 1923. American copyright laws are complicated, but books published before that magical year, 90 years prior to this one, are in the public domain. It's about as close to time travel as you can reasonably get.

To really immerse yourself in the era, you can read the travelogues of Sir Frank Fox, a kind of early-twentieth century Bill Bryson. An Australian journalist who spent much of his life reporting for newspapers in London, he wrote books about the natural history, geography, and ethnography of various lands, and there are five of them—on Australia, Bulgaria, England, the Balkan Peninsula, and Switzerland—available at Project Gutenberg for free. For this review, I read Switzerland, published in 1914.

As a rule, one of the risks of inhabiting this pre-1923 world is drowning in a sea of unnecessary words. Today the fashion is to write with extreme clarity, projecting each scene into the reader's mind as if he or she were watching a movie, and to snip out all excess verbiage. Not a hundred years ago—reading Fox is a bit like codebreaking, with sentences that sometimes encompass eleven or twelve clauses and words that aren't used much anymore, like “waggish” and “beneficient.” His very first chapter includes a hilariously lengthy Socratic dialogue rebutting the idea that mountain people are more virtuous and vigorous than lowlanders, owing to some magical quality of the mountain air—not the introduction that a modern writer would use, but curiously charming nevertheless, once you adjust your ear to his style.

It's worth noting, too, that this pre-1923 world as represented by its literature is a pretty Anglocentric one. Fox's readers were British subjects, or former British subjects, so perhaps it's no surprise that he is eager to caricature “the Swiss race” and make his own sweeping generalizations about why they are the way they are, while simultaneously tearing down other sentimental depictions. And the chapter on Swiss prehistory is threaded with regular assertions that human society is on an ever-upward trend, with pathetic (yet noble) nomads at the bottom and the 1914 European at the crest.

But it's an interesting experience, revisiting the literary fashions and the inherited wisdom of a time not so long ago. To the modern reader interested in geography and ethnography, and not afraid to put on a monocle and go along for the ride, Switzerland is fun reading. The prehistory chapter includes a great summary of what was known about the villages-on-stilts that fringed many Swiss lakes in Celtic times. The chapter on local writers includes an anecdote about the time Byron, visiting the fashionable salons along Lake Geneva, attempted to scandalize polite society as he had in Britain, and failed. Apparently the Swiss found him tedious. And the chapter on the Alps, along with a compact treatise on the formation and decay of mountains, includes this note:

“M. Charles Rabot [a geographer and mountaineer] asserts that the glaciers in Argentina are also retreating, and surmises, from data perhaps not so well established, that there has been a general retreat of glaciers during the last half of the nineteenth century throughout Spitzenbergen, Iceland, Cetnral Asia, and Alaska. He suggests that the cause is a present tendency towards equalisation of the earth's temperature. Others more boldly affirm that the Swiss glaciers, as well as other great ice masses existing on the globe, are remnants of the last Ice Age, and are all doomed to disappear as the cycle works round for the full heat of the next Warm Age. But the disappearance, if it is to come, will not come quickly, and the doom of ice-climbing in Switzerland is too remote a threat to disturb the Alpinist.”

That passage falls with quite a different meaning on our ears today, and one of the great pleasures of reading Fox is looking for these harmonies and dissonances, the moments that reveal how much has stayed the same and how much has changed. If that sounds like fun to you, then there's a cache of free ebooks waiting for you on Fox's Gutenberg author page.

Happy time-traveling.

Veronique Greenwood is a former staff writer at DISCOVER Magazine. She writes about everything from caffeine chemistry to cold cures to Jelly Belly flavors, and her work has appeared in Scientific American, TIME.com, TheAtlantic.com, and others. Follow her on Twitter here.

Snowfallization

2013-10-24T13:05:00-07:00

Review of "Sea Change," by Steve Ringman and Craig Welch, Seattle Times. Web site.

Review of "The Course of Their Lives," by Mark Johnson and Rick Wood, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Web site.

Last year on Download the Universe, Veronique Greenwood wrote a review of a story about an avalanche. Journalists write about avalanches fairly regularly, but this piece, called "Snowfall" was different. It was a one-man-band of text, video, maps, and unfolding photos. The story attracted millions of readers and earned scads of awards, including a Pulitzer. And it has ushered in an era of big, ambitious online packages of newspaper reporting. Not surprisingly, science offers some of the best stories for the Snowfall approach.

One recent example is "Sea Change," published last month by the Seattle Times. Photographer Steve Ringman and reporter Craig Welch tackled the immense but little-known disaster that is ocean acidification. The carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere doesn't just warm the atmosphere. It also lowers the pH of sea water, making the chemistry of the ocean dangerous for some species. Oyster companies are already feeling the effects of the dropping pH, and if we continue to acidify the oceans at our current rate, the ecological effects could be tremendous.

Here's a nine-minute video from the project:

The package Ringman and Welch have created has three main text stories. It starts with an overview of acidification research, which is followed by two close-ups on fisheries that are being affected--namely, oysters and crabs. (Both are economically important to the Seattle Times's local readers.) Welch reports the stories in the classic mode of environmental journalism, mixing together in-person reporting in far-flung locations with explanations of the research that revealed the scale of the problem. The photos are impressive, the videos are well made, and the visualizations--which try to convey how big the phenomenon of ocean acidification is--are fairly successful.

If you've already read "Snowfall," the presentation of "Sea Change" doesn't feel like a bolt out of the blue. But that just shows how much our expectations have shifted. Just look back seven years to a similar series called "Altered Oceans" from the Los Angeles Times, to see what I mean. The authors, Kenneth Weiss and Usha Lee McFarling, won a Pulitzer for their efforts, which were even more ambitious than "Sea Change." Rather than focus on one way we're ravaging the oceans, they set out to create a picture of all of them, from pollution to climate change.

Although it came out in 2006, the "Altered Oceans" package of stories holds up well today. But the packaging is showing its age. The fancy front page takes you to five stories that are nothing but text. There are also animations and photos, but they're squirreled away in slow-loading pages. After looking at one of these pages, I discovered there was no way to find my way back to the front page again. Seven years of programming advances made "Snowfall" possible--and now raise our expectations for such ambitious online pieces. (Welch recently discussed the making of "Sea Change" with the Columbia Journalism Review.)

From the mountaintops of "Avalanche" and the open oceans of "Sea Change," we take a claustrophobic trip indoors with "The Course of Their Lives." It's a four-part series from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel about medical students dissecting the cadavers of people who donated their bodies to science. There's no news here, no warning of an impending disaster. Instead, reporter Mark Johnson and photographer Rick Wood faithfully follow students through a remarkable experience--getting to take apart another human being, down to the brain and guts. Wood and Johnson both bring an emotional sensitivity to the project that makes reading it a deeply moving, human experience.

While I would heartily recommend "The Course of Their Lives," I would also point out some shortcomings. I don't want to belittle the piece by talking about them; they're worth talking about as a way to ponder the kinds of decisions that newspapers make when they create Snowfall-esque stories about science.

Some of the bells and whistles attached to "The Course of Their Lives" don't add much. The videos are mostly of talking heads, who sometimes speak stiltedly. Distilling people's words down in compelling written prose remains a superior technology to a video camera that's simply switched on.

I was also underwhelmed by the interactive anatomical diagrams that went along with the stories. They're meant to illustrate the lessons that the students learned about the cadavers, organ by organ. But who actually needs to see lungs light up on a diagram of a body to know what lungs are? The powers of visualization, both online and in apps, are spectacular. (My favorite anatomical example remains this ebook about Leonardo Da Vinci's anatomical sketchbooks.) But there's no point in using those powers simply to check off a box in a to-do list. It's another lesson that we should respect the technology of prose.

Ironically, the prose itself in "The Course of Their Lives" also felt a bit antiquated. American newspaper journalism long ago settled on a certain style. The paragraphs became short, and the sentences shorter. The words needed to be plain and serviceable. There were perfectly good reasons for this approach--but a lot of them had to do with the physical properties of printed newspapers. Stories couldn't be made of densely packed paragraphs, for example, because editors would need the freedom to cut off sections of stories at the last minute to make them fit their available space.

These were good reasons, but they had some odd consequences. Along with their standard fare of short news pieces, newspapers would also prepare a few massive, long-form pieces--Pulitzer-bait, essentially--but these pieces often retained the staccato structure of short news stories. In these sprawling pieces, that style read strangely. And once New Journalism's masters like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese turned magazine features into a new art form, the adherence to the old style in newspapers became even more peculiar.

Today, as newspapers and magazines shift online, that style has grown even more out of date. If you read stories from publications that got their start online, such as the Atavist, you never find the staccato style of old newspaper stories. There's no need to adhere to it.

Thus "Sea Change" and "The Course of Our Lives" serve as illustrations of journalism in transition--created by people trying to figure out how to bring the best of the old world of newspapers and leave the rest behind.

(Photos: Top-Steve Ringman, Bottom-Rick Wood)

Carl Zimmer writes the "Matter" column for the New York Times and is the author of 13 books, including Evolution: Making Sense of Life.

Seduced By Character

2013-08-26T06:00:00-07:00

Obsessed, by Steve Volk. Published by Discover In-Depth. Available at Kalmbach Bookstore, $1.99.

Reviewed by Virginia Hughes

A great long-form narrative demands at least one irresistible character. If a writer finds a protagonist who is quirky, contradictory, charming, sadistic, or interesting in any other way, the reader will follow that character through any number of complex ideas.

In OBSESSED: The Compulsions and Creations of Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz, released this past weekend, writer Steve Volk finds that special character and describes him beautifully. According to Volk's depiction, Schwartz is a socially awkward, belligerent psychiatrist whose research has been unfairly shunned by the scientific establishment. He is an unsung hero whose revolutionary behavioral therapy has rescued thousands of people from the irrational fears and repetitive behaviors of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). If his success continues, Schwartz may even rescue the withering concept of free will.

Great long-form science writing is not only about the yarn, however. It's also about pulling away from the character's seductive orbit in order to put his or her ideas into a wider scientific context. And Obsessed, unfortunately, doesn't do that well. Volk tells a slanted truth about Schwartz, the man, and about how his work fits into the larger field of anxiety research. That shortcoming is particularly disappointing given that Obsessed is the debut long-form e-book of an established science magazine, Discover.

It's obvious from the first few pages of Obsessed that Volk, a senior writer at Philadelphia Magazine, is a master of narrative. If there was ever a dull moment in the book's 13,000-plus words, I don't remember it.

I worry, though, that because of its compelling and seemingly authoritative story, readers will come away from the book with inaccurate ideas about anxiety disorders and how the mind works.

Take Schwartz's therapy, for example, which is a combination of mindfulness—a technique borrowed from Buddhist meditation in which you try to detach yourself from your emotions by focusing on breathing or some other innocuous behavior—and reappraisal, or explicitly focusing on naming and re-framing your emotions. Volk describes Schwartz's therapy as novel and even revolutionary—a thorn in the side of the psychiatric establishment and its beloved pharmaceuticals.

But Volk largely ignores the fact that Schwartz's approach is only a slight variation of other kinds of cognitive behavioral therapies (including exposure therapy, which Schwartz oddly villifies). These treatments have been around for decades and are firmly established among psychiatrists as effective for some people with anxiety disorders.

So the fact that Schwartz's therapy works for many people with OCD is not at all surprising. The brain changes with our day-to-day experiences—it's why even adults can learn new things, and yes, why some people with addiction, depression, and anxiety disorders can overcome them without drugs. There aren't many neuroscientists or psychiatrists who would disagree with that.

Where Schwartz stirs up trouble, Volk explains, is in his leap from the existence of an adaptable brain to the existence of free will:

“We’re talking about people with a biological brain disorder,” says Schwartz, “who learn through the use of neuroplasticity to change their brain function! That’s free will in action!”

It is a claim that flies in the face of most modern neuroscientific research, which suggests an ever-increasing number of our “choices” are somehow hard-wired into us—from which candidate we vote for to which flavor of ice cream tops our cone.

But there are actually lots of neuroscientists who believe in free will. (Even David Eagleman, one of the three scientists whom Volk puts in the anti-free-will camp, is on the fence about it.) It's an age-old question that people have debated forever. I suspect that Schwartz's colleagues don't like him for two of his other, crazier ideas, neither of which is adequately challenged in the book.

The first is Schwartz's theory about the physical processes underlying free will. In one head-spinning chapter, Volk explains how a combination of wave-particle duality, quantum Zeno, and Hebb's law might prove that the mind is separate from the brain. Volk tells us that "this is an idea in its infancy", yet neglects to include any outside comments from independent physicists or neuroscientists. The reader is left with no sense of how plausible—or crackpot—this theory is.

The second overlooked part of Schwartz's biography is his recent conversion to Christianity. Here's how Volk describes it:

The most important new development in Schwartz’s life underscores the schism between the champion of free will and the academics who oppose him: Schwartz has become a devoted Christian, his faith formed in great part by reading the essays of Deitrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor executed by the Nazis for insurrection. His faith seems odd at first—the young Jew, turned Buddhist, scientist and then Christian. But in the life-story of Deitrich Bonhoeffer, Schwartz’s guidepost for Christianity, there is a finer and firmer example of Schwartz’s own tough-mindedness. Bonhoeffer believed so strongly he died for it, openly opposing the Hitler regime that ultimately assassinated him.

What's never mentioned, however, is that in accepting Christ, Schwartz also seems to have rejected evolution. He is one of several hundred scientists to sign A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism, a document put together by the Discovery Institute, a conservative Christian think tank that lobbies for creationism. The signatories of that document, including Schwartz, endorsed the statement: "We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life."

With that kind of public rejection of a fundamental law of biology, is it any wonder that some scientists are skeptical of Schwartz's other ideas?* And doesn't his alignment with creationists deserve at least a mention in a story of his scientific career?

Jeffrey Schwartz is a character, and one that I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know. But ultimately, the man's obsessions corrupted his work—and Volk's work, too.

*Update, 9/8/13: Schwartz signed the Discovery Institute document in 2004, years after being condemned by his peers. So that couldn't be part of his critics' motivations, as I speculated in the review, and I regret that error. Since my review appeared, Volk and Discover In-Depth have issued an updated version of the book that includes a paragraph about Schwartz's ties with the Discovery Institute. You can download the book here.

Virginia Hughes is a science writer based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Nature, Popular Science, and Slate, and her blog Only Human is part of National Geographic magazine’s Phenomena. Follow her on Twitter.

DTU Editor Maia Szalavitz contributed much to the reporting and thinking behind this review

Rejoicing In Ants With A Citizen Science Ebook

2013-05-03T07:54:16-07:00

Dr. Eleanor's Book of Common Ants. Text by Eleanor Spicer Rice. Photographs by Alex Wild. Available at The School of Ants. iPad or pdf. Free.

Reviewed by Carl Zimmer

Many plants grow a thick coat around their seeds. The coat, called an elaiosome, doesn't do the seed any good, at least directly. Its immediate job is to attract an insect known as the winnow ant. (The photo here shows winnow ants discovering blood root seeds.) The eliaosome releases fragrant odors that lure the ants, which carry the seed into their nest. There they gnaw away at the coating but spare the seed. The ants then carry the shucked seedback out to the forest floor, where it germinates.

The winnow ants thus act like gardeners, protecting the seeds from predators that would destroy the seeds, while also spreading them far from their parent plant. Remove winnow ants from a forest, and its populations of wildflowers will shrink.

As a resident of the northeastern United States, I always assume that all the magnificent examples of coevolution must be going on somewhere else. The jungles of Ecuador, the Mountains of the Moon--these are the places where nature-film producers go to find species exquisitely adapted to each other. This, of course, just belies my far-less-than-complete education in natural history. While reading Dr. Eleanor's Book of Common Ants, I discovered that winnow ants are abundant in New England, along with the rest of the eastern United States. The next time I am out on a walk in the local woods, I'm going to keep an eye out for these elegant little insects.

Dr. Eleanor's Book of Common Ants is itself an elegant little book--and an instructive example of how ebooks can become a tool in the growing citizen science movement. "Citizen science" typically refers to research that relies not just on a handful of Ph.D. researchers, but also on a large-scale network of members of the public. Birders have been doing citizen science for over a century, and now the Internet enables people to collaborate on many other projects, from mapping neurons in the eye to folding proteins to recognizing galaxies. Many of these projects yield solid scientific results (see this paper in Nature, with over 57,000 co-authors as an example). They also provide a new way for research to draw non-scientists into their world.

At North Carolina State University, biologist Rob Dunn and his colleagues have built a little empire of citizen science projects. I myself eagerly participated in his survey of the microbial life dwelling in the human belly button. (I've got 58 species, which turns out to be below average.) More recently, they've created a project they've dubbed The School of Ants. Here's how they describe it:

The School of Ants project is a citizen-scientist driven study of the ants that live in urban areas, particularly around homes and schools. Teachers, students, parents, kids, junior-scientists, senior citizens and enthusiasts of all stripes are involved in collecting ants in schoolyards and backyards using a standardized protocol so that we can make detailed maps of the wildlife that lives just outside our doorsteps. The maps that we create with these data are telling us quite a lot about native and introduced ants in cities, not just here in North Carolina, but across the United States.

The School of Ants web site has plenty of information to help amateur ant hunters recognize the species trundling across a nearby sidewalk and then share their findings. But, like most web sites, it one works best as a sprawling reference. Its architecture doesn't lend itself well to the sustained education required to become a backyard myrmecologist. For that experience, it's hard to beat a book.

Hence, Dr. Eleanor's Book of Common Ants. Eleanor Spicer Rice has written a 142-page introduction to these insects. She describes 13 common American species, such as the winnow ants, and also provides a general introduction to their biology. Rice writes for a young audience, but fortunately she doesn't see that as an opportunity to write badly. Her style is clear, fluid, and engaging. (I'm fond of the way she described winnow ants as "rusty ballerinas.")

The design and artwork in the book are also excellent. Neil McCoy created the book using iBook Author, Apple's free software for making ebooks for the iPad. The design is clean, despite the fact it combines text, maps, photo galleries, and videos. I still use a first-generation iPad, waiting (or hoping?) for it to die, but it never struggled as it displayed the elements of Dr. Eleanor's Book of Common Ants. What makes it especially lovely is the abundance of photographs by Alex Wild, the Ansel Adams of arthropods. The tiny size of the photo I included with this review doesn't do justice to his work, but the large-scale format of his images on the iPad does.

I can quibble, but not for very long. This ebook is only available for iPad, for which I blame Apple, not McCoy. (You can get a pdf version, which lacks the galleries and video.) The ebook includes Google maps for each species, but they're not interactive. Readers are instructed to go to the School of Ants web site for interactive versions, with no link on the page to take you there. But I can't follow this line of grousing very long before I remember that this ebook is free (thanks to the support that the project gets from sources such as the Burroughs Wellcome Fund). I would have gladly paid for it. I heartily recommended it not just to people who want to join the School of Ants project, but anyone who wants to appreciate the miniature beauty and complexity of ants. And I hope that Dr. Eleanor's Book of Common Ants inspires other citizen science projects to produce informative ebooks of their own.

Carl Zimmer writes frequently about science for the New York Times and is the author of 13 books, including Evolution: Making Sense of Life.

The Library: April 29 Additions

2013-04-29T07:27:00-07:00

Each week, we add some new titles of science ebooks to the Library. We will review a selection of them. Here are our newest additions:

City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There

The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You've Never Heard Of, by Lisa Song and Elizabeth McGowan

The Origin of Darwinism (Essays from The Guardian.)

The Wrong Way to Write about Epigenetics and Violence

2013-04-09T14:44:59-07:00

"The Ghost in the Cell," by Scott C. Johnson. Published by Matter. Available via Web, ePub, Kindle. $.99.

Reviewed by Annalee Newitz

It's a prize that scientists have sought since the early nineteenth century: a biological marker that predicts violent behavior in humans. In the 1830s, phrenologists believed head bumps could reveal a criminal personality -- often, prostitutes and the poor were said to have bumps that marked them as deviants from birth. But today, it seems this pursuit may have moved beyond the realm of pseudoscience.

Thanks to recent discoveries, we have evidence that the genes of abused children are marked by the experience. Over time, these effects leave them prone to depression and make it harder for them to control their violent impulses. Could we be on the cusp of discovering a scientific approach to a social problem? In an essay for Matter magazine, former war correspondent Scott C. Johnson suggests that we are. Unfortunately, Johnson fails spectacularly to explain the complexity of this problem, and winds up telling a story that distorts both the science and the reality of abuse in many people's lives.

Epigenetics is the study of how environment and non-genetic molecular activity affect development. Johnson shows us how seemingly-unrelated studies in the field converge to offer a picture of the violence-haunted brain. One study that Johnson describes suggests there may be an epigenetic pathway to suicide, whereby an abusive childhood leaves the brain starved for the neurotransmitters that normally keep our moods on an even keel. Johnson also delves into public health studies which show that violent behavior has its roots in childhood.

Johnson argues that we need to look at these studies in light of another epigenetic study that shows an abusive childhood can leave its genetic imprint even on the grandchildren of the abused person. The suggestion is that violence isn't just a social cycle, but a hereditary one. These studies and others like them have renewed many researchers' interest in childhood interventions to prevent violent adults. They're especially significant if it turns out to be true that the epigenome, as Johnson puts it, is "more malleable" in early life.

Johnson's science reporting here leads to a few interesting conclusions, but he glosses over many of the questions and controversies in epigenetics. He doesn't mention that other epigenetic studies have shown that humans retain neural plasticity throughout most of their lives. Nor does he admit that "criminality" and "propensity to violence" are traits that are difficult to define, especially at the level of neuroscience and genetics.

But most of The Ghost in the Cell doesn't deal with science. Instead, it deals with the violent life of one woman.

Throughout the essay, Johnson foregrounds the story of Yokia Mason, who lives in a high-crime, African-American neighborhood in Oakland, CA. We assume she's there to provide a human face for his descriptions of how epigenetics researchers and others are tackling at the influence of childhood experiences on gene expression. But we never learn how Johnson met Mason, nor why she's telling her story to a journalist. Has she been working with some of the scientists in the article? No. Is she the subject of a scientific investigation into genetics and violence? No.

So why is Mason in this essay at all? As we learn more about her background, one begins to get the extremely creepy feeling that Mason went to the most impoverished neighborhood in Oakland, the city where he lives, and asked people there to tell him about their violent backgrounds. Though Johnson and the scientists he interviews are careful to explain that they are not trying to bring race into this story of genes and violence, the entire shape of this article belies that assertion. It seems as if Johnson chose to profile Mason entirely because she's a black woman who lives in a low-income area with a lot of gang violence.

Mason feels "haunted" by violence, she tells Johnson, and he takes this to mean that she may be one of these people whose brains are primed for violence by a history of abuse. By extension, he hints, her entire neighborhood may be a hotbed of people whose brains are hardwired for crime. And this is where Johnson's essay moves from merely problematic to simply bad science writing.

As any of the scientists he interviewed could have told him -- if he'd bothered to ask -- Mason is a classic example of somebody whose situation is too overdetermined for us to make any solid claims about her propensity for violence. Is she influenced by a genetic predisposition she inherited, by her own childhood experiences affecting her epigenetically, or by social issues we can't quantify in the lab like economic difficulties, stress from having children when she was a teenager, or living in a neighborhood with gangs? We can't possibly know without studying her brain intensively, and even then the answers would be extremely murky.

Holding Mason up as the human face of these epigenetic studies is worse than misleading. She's a narrative non sequitur whose presence brings up the nineteenth-century notion that black people are somehow biologically destined for poverty and violence. One wonders why Johnson didn't choose to tell the story of somebody who is actually the subject of studies on violence. Instead he simply says that Mason is "the sort of person" who has been studied before, mostly by policy makers and social scientists:

Thanks to the work of Meaney and others, many researchers now believe that the neglect and fear that pervaded the Mason household will have left a powerful chemical imprint in the cells of Yokia and her siblings. If the scientists are right, we may have to change the way we think about tackling violence and crime.

You know, like maybe we'll tackle it by going to the poor areas of Oakland and giving everybody there forced gene therapy?

Given that child abuse is a social problem that's also common in middle-class households of all phenotypes across the United States, one would have hoped that Johnson might have explored this side of the story. What do these epigenetic studies tell us about rage-addicted CEOs whose brains were shaped by abusive parenting and sadistic prep schools?

Instead, Johnson devotes an incredible amount of time to a voyeuristic look inside Mason's life, which he reduces to a series of bullet holes, homicidal men, and children who are already in trouble with the police. This story does not humanize Mason; it objectifies her, and reifies the notion that there are some communities where crime is being bred into the next generation because of child abuse.

Epigenetics is a fantastically promising new field of study, which may ultimately shed light on how childhood shapes our neuroanatomy as well as our neuroses. But Johnson does the field a disservice by situating its story in a narrative like this one. By the end of this essay, you'll feel like you've just read a tale of phrenology rather than epigenetics, where science is being twisted to justify the idea that the people in some communities are just born broken.

Annalee Newitz is a science journalist who is the editor of io9.com and the author of the forthcoming book Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (Doubleday).

UPDATE: Scott Johnson, the author of "The Ghost in the Cell," has responded to this review over at Medium.

Autism, Inside and Out

2013-04-02T12:45:50-07:00

Asperger Love: Searching for Romance When You're Not Wired to Connect by Amy Harmon. A New York Times/Byliner Original. Available for Kindle, iPad, Kobo, and Nook, $2.99.

And Straight On Till Morning: Essays on Autism Acceptance, edited by Julia Bascom. Published by the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network. Available for Kindle, $2.99.

Reviewed by Steve Silberman

In the early 1990s, a mother told a conference of autism professionals that the upside of having a teenager on the spectrum at home is that they will never want to do the things that often get kids in trouble. There will be no need for awkward conversations about sex, because people with autism are either uninterested in or incapable of intimacy. Parents won't have to worry about a late-night knock on the door from the local sheriff, because autistic teens have no desire to party. If these generalizations now seem naïve, offensive, or some combination of the two, this mother had a lot of company in her assumptions. The notion that people on the spectrum are disinclined to seek connection with others is embedded in the very word autism, which is derived from the Greek word for self, autos.

One of the world's leading authorities on the subject, psychologist Tony Attwood, devotes only a handful of pages in his Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome to sexuality and relationships. Specifically, there are two references to "lack of desire," four to pornography, two to exploitation by predators, and two to celibacy. Casting a further chilling effect on the notion of romance, Atwood cautions potential suitors that people on the spectrum may find a friendly touch on the arm "unpleasant and even difficult to tolerate, let alone enjoy" because of sensory sensitivity, and compares embracing an autistic partner to "hugging a piece of wood." This is the historical backdrop that looms -- albeit invisibly to most readers -- behind the publication of a new ebook by Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times reporter Amy Harmon, Asperger Love: Searching for Romance When You're Not Wired to Connect.

Harmon is one of the most sensitive and savvy reporters on the subject in mainstream media. In 2011, she published "Autistic and Seeking a Place in an Adult World," an account of the search for employment by a young artist named Jason Canha. While dozens of news stories a week speculate about candidate genes, environmental factors, and other possible causes for the condition, Harmon zeroed in on the practical issue that all families face when their kid "ages out" of services: How are they supposed to support themselves and learn to live independently? At more than 7000 words, it was one of the longest features on any subject in the history of the Times, and reader response was overwhelmingly positive. Encouraged, Harmon's editors gave her several months to follow up on an insight she had while reporting on Canha: despite the fact that parents and teachers are often occupied by more pragmatic concerns, young people on the spectrum are as intensely curious about intimacy as their neurotypical peers, as even a brief tour of the discussion forums at WrongPlanet.net can attest.

Harmon's second bout of reporting produced "Navigating Love and Autism," the story of a burgeoning love affair between two young people with Asperger syndrome named Jack Robison and Kirsten Lindsmith. (Jack's father, John Elder Robison, is the author of the bestselling memoir Look Me in the Eye; his new book, Raising Cubby, is about his experiences as the autistic father of an autistic son.) That article provided the foundation for Asperger Love, which is twice as long as the original piece, and includes fuller and more nuanced portrayals of Jack, Kirsten, John Elder and his wife Maripat, and Jack and Kirsten's friend Alex Plank, the founder of WrongPlanet.net.

Asperger Love follows the familiar arc of nearly every classic tale of bright young outsiders who discover a safe haven in each other (see Romeo and Juliet and Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom.) The difference is that in this case, the lovers face not only obstacles posed by the uncomprehending world, but their own difficulties in reading one another's social signals, a profound challenge for people on the spectrum.

Early in the book, we see Lindsmith in high school, before her own Asperger's diagnosis, when she's still trying to make a relationship work with a charismatic extrovert who insists on acting as her life-coach. He urges her to stop speaking in a monotone and fidgeting with her hands; he elbows her when she goes on at length about her interest in animal physiology; he prompts her to be more affectionate and expressive by barking at her, "Don't filter!"

In one of Harmon's characteristically well-turned sentences, she says that Kirsten eventually "chafed at his frequent instructions, which required constant, invisible exertion to obey." The author gets across a lot of information in few words here: the soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend's arrogant presumption that his way of behaving would come naturally to Kirsten if she would just stop filtering herself; the annoyance that those kinds of assumptions produce; and the hard (but "invisible") work demanded of autistics who are asked to just act normal for a change.

In a similarly spare and brilliant passage, Harmon describes the little details of behavior that rise into Jack and Kirsten's mutual awareness as they fall in love:

Jack, Kirsten noticed, bit his lips, a habit he told her came from not knowing how he was supposed to arrange his face to show his emotions. Kirsten, Jack noted, cracked her knuckles, which she later told him was her public version of the hand flapping she now reserved for when she was alone.

In two sentences, Harmon expresses truths that are both universally human and distinctly autistic. Everyone experiences pressure to conform to social norms, but Harmon's description of how Jack must "arrange his face" casts light on the rigorous self-monitoring -- the "constant, invisible exertion" -- required of autistic people to get through a typical day in neurotypical society. Likewise, the detail of the knuckle-cracking deftly paints a picture of two parallel worlds: Kirsten's public life, where she too must "arrange" her spontaneous behavior to avoid calling attention to herself, and her private autistic reality, where she can flap to her heart's content.

With the same reportorial eye for the essential, Harmon skates over aspects of autism history that are so deep and hotly contested that they can best be described as yawning abysses. It's a relief to read an account of the domestic lives of autistic people that never devolves into a discussion of cortical deficits, de novo mutations, and the other impedimenta of autism narratives that make it seem as if people on the spectrum hardly exist outside of clinics, genetic databases, and MRI scanners. In that sense, Asperger Love is like the wedding announcements by same-sex couples that now run routinely in the Times: extraordinary precisely because they're so ordinary.

Only in a couple of places does Harmon's urge to simplify lead her astray. She begins her second chapter with the statement, "Only for about a decade have a group of socially impaired young people with normal intelligence and language development been recognized as the neurological cousins of individuals with classic autism." While I love the phrase "neurological cousins" so much that I will undoubtedly steal it for my own writing, this assertion is either ten years off, or 70 years off, depending on how you look at it.

The broadening of the diagnostic criteria for autism in the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (commonly known as the DSM-IV) to reflect the full breadth of what we now call the spectrum -- including the addition of "Asperger's disorder" -- took place in 1994, not 2004. It was precisely that change that made the autism of people like Jack and John Elder Robison, Kirsten Lindsmith, and Alex Plank visible to the medical establishment. Before that, all of these characters in Harmon's book would have been excluded from a diagnosis and support services, and written off as "schizotypal," neurotic, or odd.

The first person to notice that people like them are the neurological cousins of kids who are much more obviously disabled, however, was the pediatrician Hans Asperger in his clinic in Vienna way back in the 1940s; that's why the diagnosis given to people like Jack and Kirsten bears his name -- until May, anyway, when the long-awaited DSM-5 will be published, and the subcategory of Asperger's disorder will be dispensed with in favor of the umbrella term "Autism Spectrum Disorder."

The second slight misstep in Harmon's elegant dance is her use of the word "mindblindness" as the title of her second chapter. For reasons that should be self-evident, many autistic people loathe the term, which was coined by British cognitive psychologists Simon Baron-Cohen and Uta Frith in the 1980s. In its original context, the all-too-catchy neologism was their attempt to give a name to the core deficit in a clinical population so various that it encompasses both children unable to speak and brilliant coders who can't seem to shut up about the various incarnations of the Time Lord in Doctor Who. (Thus the truism in the autistic community, "If you've met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person.") The controversy over the term mindblindness -- and its relationship to compassion and empathy -- is one of the most yawning abysses in autism discourse, and too deep to do justice to here. Suffice it to say that Baron-Cohen made things worse by muddying the distinction between an inability to parse social cues in real time -- which seems to be the cognitive issue unifying all points on the spectrum -- and empathy, which is more like a capacity to care about how another person is feeling.

Anyone who has spent time with autistic people can tell you that they're intensely concerned with how other people are feeling, to the point of being overwhelmed. But they often can't piece those feelings together from the usual clues of facial expression, tone of voice, and body language. At the same time, however, autistics are often adept at reading each other's emotional states from signs that would be opaque to their typical peers. There are moments in Harmon's book when Jack and Kirsten seem to be doing that for one another. (This experience is so common that autistics refer to a second sense called "autdar" -- inspired by gaydar -- that enables them to spot a fellow Aspie in a room full of chatty neurotypicals.) Calling autistics mindblind may turn out to be as apt as calling those who don't speak English deaf.

I recently asked Uta Frith about the term and she replied: "I now avoid using it, as it seems to have led to a lot of regrettable misunderstandings. Clearly we have not done a good enough job explaining what we mean. Even the original proponents of the term are not of one mind, and there are interestingly different interpretations. For example, my interpretation is different from Simon's as regards 'empathy.' As you know, a number of my more recent papers conclude that empathy is present in autism." In other words, the term is contested even by the two clinicians who popularized it. Harmon would have been better off shunning it altogether.

That said, Asperger Love is a valuable and humane contribution to the popular literature of autism, and a touching, funny, and engaging love story that should appeal even to readers with no direct connection to the subject. One of my favorite parts of the book is the postscript, when Harmon steps forth from behind the narrative curtain to talk about what she learned by reporting the story. "The more I observed autistic behavior," she reflects, "the more my own was revealed to me in a light not available elsewhere… As I sought to portray the oddness of my autistic subjects, I found that they were altering my view of what passes for normal. Time and again they exposed my own pretensions and highlighted the absurdity of the social mores to which so many of us subscribe."

I asked Harmon to elaborate on this further in email, and she replied:

What changed for me as a result of my reporting is not so much my perception of people with autism, as my perception of the social conventions practiced by the rest of the world. Even in our most intimate relationships, we want our partners to read our minds, we value not having to ask for what we need, we fault the other for not anticipating it. Why? It seemed so refreshing, watching Jack and Kirsten, to be more forthright.

I went from thinking that people with autism needed me to help explain their oddness to the world so they could better fit in, to thinking that the world is a pretty odd place and that maybe we would all be better off rethinking some of the social conventions that seem so alien to people with autism.

Rethinking social conventions in light of autism is precisely the goal of another just-published ebook called And Straight On Till Morning: Essays on Autism Acceptance. The third title published by a non-profit group called the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, it is an anthology of essays about autism written from the inside. Each of the contributors to the book is on the spectrum themselves, the parent of an autistic child, or an ally in the disability rights movement.

Though both Asperger Love and the third ASAN anthology are text with no bells and whistles, they take advantage of new possibilities opened up by ebooks in different ways. Asperger Love enabled the author of a much-lauded Times feature to add depth and personal perspective. And Straight On Till Morning reminds me of the copies of Co-Evolution Quarterly that I read avidly as a teenager, filled with lively writing that keyed off of current events but wasn't as perishable as most magazine writing. I will be rereading the opening essay many times as one of the most eloquent descriptions of an inner life that I have ever come across, autistic or neurotypical. Written by a disability activist named Amanda Baggs, who electrified YouTube in 2007 with a video called "In My Language," "Plants Outside the Shade" begins humbly like a grade-school report, "This is a personal description of some of what autism means to me." But then it takes flight into dazzlingly original prose-poetry that takes you to the heart of autistic perception.

Autism means that my earliest memories are of floating in among the feel of things. Not how they looked or sounded, but how they felt. Words don't exist for the hundreds if not thousands of variants on this. A way of perceiving the world that has remained dominant for me even after sensory input became stronger and, later, words and ideas. It's the foundation that I always start from when I climb up the cliffs, day after day, that allow me to use words and ideas and move and understand what is around me. And no matter how high I climb, that underlying way of experiencing the world is still there.

A lot of people see this way of relating to the world as that old cliché of compensation. Where people think blind people's hearing must grow more acute. I see it differently. It's a way of experiencing things that could only have developed if more typical ways were absent. There are a lot of plants that cannot grow in the shade of a forest. But if there are no big shade-producing trees, they flourish. It's like that. Many of my experiences and abilities stem from what happens when plants can flourish outside the shade of a forest.

I can spend all day with one marble. Looking at it, feeling it on my face. One problem with trying to describe this is that there are far more possible sensations than there are words for sensations. So an entire day's worth of experiences can come out to only one sentence. And it's harder still to describe the patterns formed between those sensations. Not abstract, logical patterns but concrete, sensory patterns. And those are how I understand and interact with the world.

How might a clinician describe this experience from the outside?

"Patient Amanda B., a 32-year-old female with a pervasive developmental disorder and significant verbal impairment, perseverated with a marble for more than six hours under observation today. (The patient's mother reports that marbles and other small spherical objects are one of her daughter's 'special interests.') Amanda fixated on the marble for an extended period of time and pressed it against her cheeks for the purposes of self-stimulation. This behavior (not significantly self-injurious) was accompanied by nonsense vocalizations."

For nearly five decades, drily clinical, outside views of autism were all we had. The advent of first-person accounts by people like Temple Grandin, Jim Sinclair, Amy Sequenzia, and Julia Bascom is providing an invaluable perspective on what life on the spectrum is really like.

The autistic self has often been invisible to clinicians. Bruno Bettelheim, the psychoanalyst who proposed in the 1960s that autism is caused by "refrigerator mothers" who secretly wish their children dead, called his bestseller on the autistic psyche The Empty Fortress. I once heard a scientist receiving a lifetime achievement award at a major autism conference refer to her early days in the field as "like veterinary medicine."

The cost of that invisibility, and the brutal treatment that came with it, plays out in "The Judge Rotenberg Center on Trial," a deeply reported essay by Shain Neumeier in And Straight On Till Morning that details the case against a "treatment" center in Massachusetts that employs painful skin shocks to punish self-injurious behavior. This isn't something that happened in the dark days of behaviorism run wild in the 1960s -- it's happening now in Massachusetts, and a special rapporteur at the United Nations has deemed it torture. ASAN is currently assisting the legal effort to shut the JRC down.

In an enlightening essay called "From One Ally to the Education Community: A New View of Students with Autism," Cheryl M. Jorgensen proposes rethinking special education to focus on strengthening the natural gifts of autistic students, rather than on correcting their deficits.

"He’s a biter." "She’s a runner." "He is non-verbal." "She’s off in her own world." "There’s nothing really there, there." "He is difficult to be friends with because all he talks about is train schedules." These statements are often used to describe children and adults who have autism and they represent a belief that autism is a disease or a disorder that needs to be cured, and ultimately, eradicated; that people with autism are "abnormal" and the rest of us are "normal." When people with autism are viewed this way, the difficulties or challenges they experience are placed within them and thus, they are required to change in order to be eligible to participate in the full range of inclusive school and community activities and environments. How often have you heard it said that "She could never be included in a general education class because of her sensory issues" Or "He can’t hold a real job because of his challenging behavior issues?"

What if we changed the fundamental way that we viewed students with autism and instead of viewing autism as the problem, we viewed it as a natural part of human diversity? What if, instead of trying to make people with autism "normal," we intentionally looked for their strengths and viewed their challenges as problems with their environment? What if we appreciated the unique talents of students with autism and recognized the contributions that they might make to our schools and communities?

Ideas like this are gaining traction in the special-education community (see Thomas Armstrong's excellent new book Neurodiversity in the Classroom) because they bring out the best in every student, including those with dyslexia, ADHD, and others who think and learn differently from their peers -- while 70 years of trying to force autistic kids to "act normal for a change," and punishing them for harmless behavior like hand-flapping, has only added to their challenges in daily life.

These two new ebooks, with two very different perspectives, arrive at the same conclusion: By understanding autism from the inside, we become more fully human -- no matter where we are on the grand spectrum.

Steve Silberman is the author of the upcoming book NeuroTribes: Thinking Smarter About People Who Think Differently, to be published in 2014 by Avery Books/Penguin. He is also the author of the NeuroTribes blog on the Public Library of Science and a correspondent for Wired magazine.

A Comic Book Guide to Rewiring Life

2013-03-28T16:44:56-07:00

Adventures in Synthetic Biology. Story by Drew Endy and Isadora Deese and the MIT Synthetic Biology Working Group. Art by Chuck Wadey. Originally published in 2005. Available for free, PDF

Reviewed by Carl Zimmer

In the early 1970s, three scientists ran a simple experiment. They cut genes out of the DNA of a frog and inserted them into E. coli. The frog genes functioned in their new home. The microbe was able to make RNA from them, the first step in translating the information in genes into proteins. And when the microbe divided in two, it made new copies of the frog genes along with its own. It was, to some extent, a microbe-frog hybrid.

The experiment was simple only in its concept, though. It had taken the scientists--Herbert Boyer, Stanley Cohen, and John Morrow--years of research to find the tools to do the job, such as enzymes that bacteria use slice up the DNA of invading viruses. And because it had been the first time that anyone had achieved such a feat, it shook the world.

On the one hand, many scientists and pharmaceutical companies saw a huge potential future for gene pasting. Imagine E. coli carrying the gene for human insulin, for example. Instead of harvesting insulin from cow pancreases, it would be possible to brew insulin the same way people brew beer. One company that sprang up in the wake of the frog-microbe experiment, Cetus, promised that by 2000, virtually all diseases would be cured with proteins made through the genetic engineering that Boyer and his colleagues had invented.

On the other hand, critics saw the apocalypse. Some feared that insulin-pumping E. coli would run amok and spread an epidemic of diabetic comas. If the world embraced genetic engineering, the eminent biologist Erwin Chargaff warned, "the future will curse us."

Forty years after Boyer and his colleagues created their frog-microbe hybrid, the extreme predictions at either end of the prophecy spectrum have failed to come true. No diabetic coma epidemic. (E. coli burdened with human insulin genes can't compete with their lean, wild relatives.) Instead, millions of diabetics get a reliable supply of insulin from the microbes. On the other hand, just having a microbial factory doesn't automatically mean you can cure all diseases. Or even many of them. (I write more about how E. coli launched the biotech industry in my book Microcosm.)

Now, however, genetic engineering is morphing into something new. In the late 1990s, a group of engineers and biologists came together to try to manipulate cells the way they might manipulate the circuits in computer. The analogy between computers and cells is far from perfect, because our bodies are the product of evolution rather than a computer factory. Nevertheless, we have genes that switch other genes on and off, and some genes require inputs from several other genes before they make their own proteins. Cells use this genetic circuitry to detect signals, to process information, and to make decisions. The engineers and biologists set out to rewire that circuitry, inserting many different genes in combinations that would produce new behaviors. They called their project synthetic biology.

As Paul Voosen wrote recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education, synthetic biology is having some growing pains, as scientists balance the promise of the science with the struggles they still face to rewire cells. But along the way, they've made some important fundamental advances. Today, for example, Drew Endy from Stanford and his colleagues reported that they had devised logic gates for E. coli--a transistor-like set of genes that can perform the simple operations that can be combined to carry out computation.

This is a big deal, but it's tricky to explain why. Drew Endy has made a notable effort to introduce synthetic biology both to his fellow scientists and to the public, and so he did something unusual when he and his colleagues published their new paper today: he published a video in the supplementary material in which Endy describes what they've done and what it means.

And rather than keep the video hidden behind a subscription paywall, Endy posted it on YouTube. And here it is:

If you're not familiar with both transcription factors and Boolean logic, this video may fail to enlighten. Endy seems to be aware of this, because midway through the video, he refers viewers to a comic book that he and his colleagues put together, called Introducing Synthetic Biology.

The comic book first appeared in 2005 in a special issue of Nature in which Endy and a number of other researchers offered overviews of synthetic biology and discussed the ethical issues raised by rewiring life. At the time, Nature posted the comic book online in a Flash version. You can still see it in that form, but I wouldn't recommended it. Eight years later, it feels cramped and tiny. But Endy has posted it online as a free PDF, where it still feels fresh and informative.

Introducing Synthetic Biology embeds lessons about the fundamentals of the field in a comic book story. Its heroes are a grown-up scientist and a boy whose experiments with bacteria she oversees. Artist Chuck Wadey gives the narrative a stylish, quasi-psychedelic feel. The boy eagerly tries to rejigger the bacteria to fill with gas and become floating balloons, and along the way he realizes how hard it is--but also how vast the possibilities are for synthetic biology.

This is a smart, savvy piece of science writing. Endy has long focused much of his outreach at young people. In 2003, he helped found the International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition, which brought together college kids (and eventually high schoolers) to carry out experiments in synthetic biology and compete for prizes. Rather than just trying to get some old folks in charge of government and private funding to rethink how they support biotechnology research, Endy has for the past decade helped to produce hundreds of new synthetic biologists. They live the story that Introducing Synthetic Biology tells. If you (or your kids, if you've got any) want to learn about the nuts and bolts of synthetic biology, this is an excellent place to start.

It shouldn't be where you finish, though. Introducing Synthetic Biology has an almost nostalgic 1950s feeling of uncritical gee-whiz enthusiasm about synthetic biology. I couldn't help but think about A is For Atom, a 1952 cartoon from General Electric. It's actually a pretty good introduction to subatomic physics and its applications. But it's unquestionably spooky, with weirdly humanized atoms as cartoon characters and a blithe confidence that the power of the atom was firmly in mankind's control. General Electric was hardly an objective judge of the risks and benefits of the atomic age. It made big profits from building nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants (including, it just so happens, the reactors at Fukishima).

Synthetic biology is fraught with ethical questions, too. Who owns the rewired organisms it produces? What happens if they escape into the wild? Will synthetic biology just end up concentrating wealth into large corporations? Will synthetic-biology-driven energy projects end up harming the environment as more land is dedicated to feeding their enormous hunger for sugar?

Drew Endy has not shied away from these issues. He was one of the people who testified before the President's Council on Bioethics when it looked into synthetic biology in 2010. He has argued for open access to an inventory of genetic parts, rather than hiding synthetic biology behind a wall of patents. And he's taken on critics of synthetic biology in public debates, such as this one in 2008.

I will grant that it may be harder to make an engaging comic book about bioethics. But tomorrow's synthetic biologists need both enthusiasm and wisdom.

Drew Endy and Jim Thomas Debate Synthetic Biology from The Long Now Foundation on FORA.tv

Carl Zimmer writes frequently about science for the New York Times and is the author of 13 books, including Evolution: Making Sense of Life.