Our next book is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. It is the story of HeLa cells, the first immortal cell line which has been and continues to be used extensively in many fields, including cancer research, vaccine development and testing, AIDS, aging, genetics, and the effects of radiation on living cells. It is also the story of Henrietta Lacks, a poor African American woman raised as a share-cropper on a Virginia tobacco farm who died a horrible death from cancer at age 30 in 1951. It is also the story of her family who only found out about the source of the HeLa cell line many years later. (Informed consent was apparently never sought or obtained.)

The book promises many topics for discussion, including medical history, cutting edge cancer and vaccine research, medical ethics and the exploitation of poor people for medical research, history of the underclasses in America, the importance of science education, and the current health care situation. (Many of Henrietta’s descendants can’t afford to receive the treatments derived from her cells, should they develop those diseases!)

Skloot worked with the Lacks family, particularly with Henrietta’s daughter Deborah to obtain their side of the story and to help them in their personal search for answers.

The book has received excellent reviews, both on-line and from friends, and I am looking forward to reading it.

We will be meeting on Saturday, January 14, 2012 at 3 PM, most likely in the same conference room in the Northwest Science Building at Harvard that we have used recently.

The world didn’t end two weeks ago, but it could happen at any time!

Our December book (if we survive that long) will be Phil Plait’s Death From the Skies.

We will be meeting at our usual winter quarters, in Harvard’s Northwest Science Building, 52 Oxford St, Cambridge, at 3 PM Saturday, December 3. We’ll either be in the cafeteria on the 1st floor at the south end of the building, or in the conference room at the north end.

Mary posted directions last month.

Sign up on the Facebook event page if you are so inclined.

Meanwhile, for your further enterrortainment, here’s the short version of the book.

Important Update! Note date and time change.

Our next book club meeting will be on Saturday, November 5 at 5 PM at one of the usual places. (Today, we met indoors in a nice conference room with left-over bagels at the far end of our usual building, due to scheduling conflicts and iffy weather.) Stay tuned for updates.

We decided to change the time to 5 PM date to November 5 so that people could attend both the Granite State Skeptics Skepticamp and the Book Club meeting.

Our book is going to be 3-time winner Mary Roach’s Stiff, in honor of Halloween.

Since John wrote a nice summary last week about the last book we read (The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensics), I’m just going to amend that with information for our next meeting.

We are reading Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore, and we are meeting again on September 24th at 3pm. If it’s nice weather, we’ll meet in our usual spot on Harvard Yard, and if not I’ll give details on our colder weather location.

Our book club meeting this month is again at the usual place and time, 3 PM Saturday August 13 on the lawn just north of Harvard Yard, between Memorial Hall (the big ugly pseudo gothic building) and the Science Center (the big ugly modern building that looks like a flight of giant stairs to nowhere.) It’s supposed to be warm and sunny, but if it rains, we’ll move indoors to the cafeteria of the Northwest building up Oxford Street just past the museum.

The book is about the birth of forensic science (CSI: Lyon, as in Lyon, France, circa 1894.) I’m about 1/2 way through, the prime suspect is about to go to trial, and is attempting an insanity defense. It’s a pretty compelling story, all the more so because it’s true. The author alternates chapters between the story of the criminal, Joesph Vacher, and the history of forensics, mostly focusing on Professor Lacassagne of the Lyon Medical School, who was the leading forensic scientist of the time.

Quit telling me to do things!

Last Boston Skeptics’ Book Club Meeting, we met up to discuss Jon Ronson’s latest book The Psychopath Test. Personally, this book has been one of my most favorite non-fiction books that I’ve read this summer.

The beginning is a little strange and non-psychopathic in that it explores the curious case of Being or Nothingness, a book penned by an unknown weird person and sent out to various scientists. While he’s researching that subject, he walks by the office of a psychologist who specializes in psychopaths, and that’s what starts his odyssey with Broadmoor (a famous psychopath facility in the UK) and “Tony”, a man who says he faked mental illness to escape prison, but in fact he has been incarcerated longer at Broadmoor than his original sentence. When Jon confronts the psychiatrists about Tony’s fake mental illness, they tell Jon that they know Tony faked it, but in fact that is exactly what a psychopath would do, which is why he’s been locked up in Broadmoor so long. I won’t say what happens to Tony, but Jon finishes up his tale in the book.

Jon also writes about the book’s namesake, the Psychopath Test developed by psychiatrist Bob Hare. Before the ‘70s, Bob worked in a prison and used electric shocks and disturbing images to discern the psychopaths from the regular criminals. However, ethics reforms forbade this inhumane treatment, so he developed a non-violent checklist instead. Jon ends up getting trained on how to use the checklist and tries it out on a CEO known for his ruthless boardroom behavior. The CEO ends up twisting almost every point and reframing it as a leadership quality. (Funnily enough, he gives this interview in his mansion, which is filled with stuffed or gilded predators and giant oil paintings of himself.)

Jon also covers 9/11 and 7/7 conspiracy theorists, a mistaken profiler, and the abundance of misdiagnoses of childhood bipolar disorder (which is under hot debate as to whether it actually exists) and the preventable death of one child who died at age 4 of an overdose of her bipolar meds because her parents would give her some when she would get “annoying”.

If you’re looking for a quick, intriguing summer read, pick up this book. Jon always has an excellent skeptical eye and a knack for presenting his subjects in a sympathetic light. (At one point I was even feeling good that the scientologists exposed a bad psychiatrist! Not for long though.)

The book we’re reading now is The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science. Our next meeting is Saturday, August 13 at 3pm, hopefully out in Harvard Yard if the weather is nice, but stay tuned for details!

Also, if you have any suggestions for books, please leave them in the comments. (And if you were at the last meeting and suggested a book, write that in the comments too, because I forgot to write down the excellent books that everyone suggested!)

Our book club meeting this month is in the usual place and time, on the lawn just north of Harvard Yard, between Memorial Hall and the Science Center. If it rains, the meeting will be indoors in the cafeteria of the Northwest building a little way up Oxford Street.

Our book this month is The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson. It appears to be a fairly quick and fun read, so it’s not to late to start it! Even if you haven’t, we always value uninformed opinions :-)

Bring a snack to share or at very least, bring your appetite! No coffee this month (sorry), unless someone else steps up to the plate.

Place: Harvard Yard
Time: 3:00 PM Saturday July 9, 2011

It doesn't get much more dissonant than this.

This weekend, the Boston Skeptics’ Book Club met up to discuss Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, a book about Cognitive Dissonance Theory and self-justification. As skeptics, we try to be objective and judge based only on facts and reason, but we can’t avoid the effects of cognitive dissonance.

The authors write, “We justify behavior we know is wrong so that we still see ourselves as honest people.” In other not-really-much-simpler words, cognitive dissonance is the constant that balances out our moral equation. When encountering a dissonance, one must either change one’s original belief or refute/reinterpret the data to turn it to consonance. Both sides of the equation balance in our heads and our world is restored to normal. A good phrase the authors use is believing is seeing, which means that if you hold a certain belief, you have already pre-judged anything related to that belief, good or bad. If evidence agrees with us, we think it’s reliable. If not, it’s biased or foolish. Or, as George Carlin would put it, “ Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?”

If you don’t have time to read the book, here are some of the points:

• “Aggression begets self-justification, which begets more aggression”: If you say something mean to someone, they must have done something to deserve it, and therefore you need to continue to treat them badly. Admitting that you were wrong and an aggressor may be to dissonant to admit.
• Once we make a decision, we find reasons to justify why that decision was better than others.
• Asking others to do favors for you makes them like you more. (In their mind, if they did a favor for you, you must’ve been worth helping, and therefore you’re a trustworthy person.)
• Each side of a rift uses self-justification to blame the other. The only real way to end conflict is if both sides apologize, forgive, and are committed to moving on.
• “Pain felt is more intense than pain inflicted.”
• Police are under the impression that they do not interrogate innocent people, so if you find yourself in an interrogation situation, repeat this phrase: I want a lawyer. Now.
• Also, if you are ever wrongfully convicted, the prosecutor will likely not care if they find out that you’re innocent, so long as your case is closed. Put your faith in good friends and lawyers who will fight for you.

Interestingly, even though we are loath to admit mistakes (because we think people will judge us as stupid), people admire those who own up to their wrongs. In fact, patients are less likely to sue doctors that admit fault and promise to try better in the future. Making mistakes in your life is important to your learning process. It is important to think of mistakes as learning experiences instead of failures, because the former is not dissonant with the view we have of ourselves and we will work harder instead of trying to be perfect.

Of course, this book confirms my previously held beliefs about cognition, and therefore it is unbiased and reliable.

However, a few people at Book Club brought up the point that while the book has many examples of how cognitive dissonance affects us, it doesn’t examine how to deal with overcoming cognitive dissonance. There are a few examples here and there but mostly the book just illustrates our lack of free will. Personally, I don’t think there is any one way of dealing with dissonance in others, except by just planting a seed of doubt. It’s very important that when you are expressing a skeptical view point to someone who has been drinking the holistic homeopathic water, you aren’t too forceful about it. Self-justification can be a gradual process, so just by explaining your view calmly, you might have an eventual lasting impression. If you express your view in a not-so-friendly manner, it will be too much and your arguments will be explained away. People are more receptive to change if they think it’s come as a personal revelation, not just because someone told them so.

The next book club meeting is on Saturday, June 11th from 3-5pm and we are discussing The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris. Location is TBD, depending on the weather, but we should be meeting either in Harvard Yard or in our usual indoor spot in the cafeteria of the Northwest Building on Harvard Campus in Cambridge.

It's always sunny in Tatooine

Since the weather is going to be in the 60s today (plus the fact that our normal meeting spot is being taken over by about 600 people), we’re meeting outside in our old spot in Harvard Yard, today at 3pm. More details on the location here.

Come and join us to discuss cognitive dissonance and Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), and don’t forget to bring a snack! See you there!

Gallium Spoons: Only for hardcore fans of heavy metal (poisoning)

Last time, at the Boston Skeptics’ Book Club: Discovery. Mayhem. Profiteering. Arrogance. Science! All of these points and more were involved in the discovery and use of elements on the Periodic Table.

The Disappearing Spoon is divided up into five parts:

1. “Orientation: Column by Column, Row by Row.” This section discusses the basics of the table and how the geography is the key to decoding the properties of the elements. We take a trip to the town of Ytterby in Sweden, the proverbial Galapagos of the Periodic Table because of the ample supply of distinct minerals and Lanthanides. Also, we learn that antimony used to be used as a laxative pill, and it was so robust it was actually retrieved afterwards and passed down through family generations. Yum!
2. “Making Atoms, Breaking Atoms.” This chapter starts off with a discussion that can be summed up by Carl Sagan: “We are all star stuff contemplating star stuff.” Then it transitions into how science and the elements were used as weapons of war. One particularly ruthless scientist, Fritz Haber (a man who converted from Judaism to Lutheranism to benefit his career), developed chemical warfare and bombs for the Nazis in WWII, including the infamous Zyklon B (used in gas chambers during the Holocaust). Finally it concludes with the rabidly anti-science (among other things) John Birch Society and how American scientists envied the allegedly more scientific Russian Marxists. But there’s a twist! The Marxists actually did not believe in genetic theory and in fact shipped dissenting scientists off to work as mining slaves.
3. “Periodic Confusion: The Emergence of Complexity.” The theme of this section was the impact that the elements can have on our human physiology. The cadmium sludge disaster at the Kamioka Mines killed many rice farmers because cadmium can replace many minerals in one’s body and cause broken bones and kidney failure. Silver and copper are antimicrobial because they disrupt the metabolism of microbes. Also: How tastebuds work!
4. “The Elements of Human Character.” Did you know that Marie Curie named the element polonium as a political statement to show her controversial (?) support of her home country Poland? Neither did most people alive at the time she named it. And so, the theme of this section is how the elements have been viewed and used in popular culture. One fun story involves Nazis looking for illegal gold and Neils Bohr dissolving some gold Nobel Prize medals (given to him for safekeeping) so that he wouldn’t get caught. (After the war, his lab precipitated the gold out and had it recast.) Other stories include: A possible theory behind the “Midas Touch” legend; Robert Lowell, the famous manic-depressive poet, and lithium; and how the man who discovered x-rays thought he had gone insane once he saw the bones in his hand. Fortunately, in the last story, he uses his wife to confirm that she can see bones too, so he knows he’s not crazy. However, she thinks she’s just seen a death omen. But hey, all for science, right?
5. “Element Science: Today and Tomorrow.” This section explores how modern scientists endeavor to discover new elements in the table by applying extreme or different forces to current elements. For example, subjecting some elements to extreme cold can cause them to form a new atomic layout (as one unfortunate South Pole expedition found out when their tin-soldered oil cans broke apart at the seams and leaked all over their food). There’s a bit of discussion on the people who work for the Bureau of Standards and Measurements (who are the gold standard of anal-retentiveness)., and the mystery of scientific constants, which may not always be as constant as we once thought.

If you’re looking for some science, history, and tales of adventure, this book is definitely worth a read. The biggest complaint about this book at our discussion table was that it (like most of the science books we’ve been reading) jumps around a little too much chapter by chapter, although that probably is to be expected in a book that covers the diverse history of every single element in the Periodic Table. I enjoyed the historical tidbits and tales of nefarious scientists moreso than the actual science.

Our next book is Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. We are meeting up on Saturday, April 30 at 3pm in our normal meeting spot in the Harvard University Northwest Building (check previous posts for pictures and address). If, however, the weather is going to be beautiful (none of this sunny-with-a-cold-breeze shit we’ve been getting), I’ll post an announcement and we’ll meet up on Harvaaahhd Yaahhd, where we met in the summer. Bring yourself, bring a snack, and of course bring a book suggestion to add to our list!