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.

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.

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'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!

Video evidence of a ghost? Alien hand syndrome? Clear and poorly acted fraud? Clearly all equal possibilities!

Last Book Club meeting, we discussed Joe Nickell’s Adventures in Paranormal Investigation. (Spoiler alert: All alleged paranormal activity was discovered to be fake or misjudged.) This book is actually a collection of his articles from the magazine Skeptical Inquirer and so it didn’t have the normal flow of a book. Each chapter was written decently, but it was full of Skeptic 101 material (The legend of the Crystal Skulls, Peter Popoff’s Ministry of Fraud, dowsing, crop circles, etc.), so it wasn’t a book that I enjoyed reading  but it is an excellent primer for anyone new to the movement who previously believed in these things.

Even though the title of the book mentions Adventures and Investigation, the book lacked both. A few chapters were written in a way to include the actual investigation process (“Abraham Lincoln’s Spirit Writing”), and the author did do a little traveling, but too many chapters were just frank discussions of beliefs that people have. There is a chapter about the castle that may have inspired the naming of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and there is another chapter about people who celebrate The Day of the Dead, no investigations involved (not that any were necessary).

I’m not completely down on this book though. Clearly the author takes many of these claims seriously because he doesn’t want to think of himself as someone who solely debunks, which has the (unintentional?) effect of making a few of the chapters very humorous. For example, in “The Case of the Alien Hand,” a green, hand-like artifact was found in some hay and presented to the author for investigation. He notes that the skin is stretchy, green, and smells like latex, and he has very detailed photos showing manufacturing defects from the latex-coating process. He concludes that the hand probably belonged to a plastic ghoul and was caught up in a piece of farm equipment before ending up in the hay. I think it took me longer to read this chapter than it would have to find a green hand and proclaim its artificial origin.

Our next meeting is Saturday, March 26th at 3pm in our normal meeting spot in Harvard. We’ll be discussing The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean.

And for all you who like to read the following book the month before, I have a surprise for you: Here is the official Book Club list, take a look and let me know what book we should read next! Or suggest a new one if it’s not listed! Even if you have never made a meeting before, make a suggestion! (OK, I’ve reached my exclamation point quota for the week. Maybe!)

While you’re out this weekend enjoying the first signs of New England Mud Season, come stop by Harvard and chat with the Boston Skeptics’ Book Club! We are meeting at the Northwest Building at Harvard (as usual) at 3pm on Saturday, February 19th (tomorrow!) to discuss Adventures in Paranormal Investigation by Joe Nickell. And if you’re so inclined, bring a snack!

Don’t be shy if you haven’t been able to come before or if you haven’t finished (or read) the book. You can often fake your way through a meeting as long as you can come up with a tertiarily-related Star Trek reference! All new members are welcome.

Human Bender: The Ultimate Self-Experimenter

Last week, the Boston Skeptics’ Book Club met outside for the last time before the upcoming eight months of winter to snack on an endless variety of cookies and pasta salad and to discuss Who Goes First? The Story of Self Experimentation in Medicine by Lawrence K. Altman. This book is excellent for anyone who wants to know the history of science, because many scientists have dabbled in self-experimentation and there are a lot of interesting stories about how modern treatments came into being.

Some chapters in the book droned on a bit (the parasite chapter was rather disappointing unless you enjoy reading about the many ways scientists have ingested flukes), but the good news is that most chapters were no longer than 20 pages and they each covered a different topic, so you can skip through the boring chapters if you want to get to the good stuff.

The book went over areas of self-experimentation including: the origin of the Rabies vaccine (and how Louis Pasteur is not technically a member of the prestigious Pasteurian Club); heart surgery using a catheter (the scientist experimenting with this one had to literally fight off the x-ray tech trying to yank the catheter out); experimentation with different forms of anesthesia (including how to cure a morphine addiction with cocaine); the yellow fever experiments (and more black vomit and other bodily excretions than you can imagine); how scientists deprived themselves of nutrients to develop wartime rationing diets (and why our junk food is so fortified with vitamins); the glory days of science when lab-grade LSD was free to scientists (for research only, of course); and how scientists were able to determine the cause of food poisoning (and the unfortunate “kitten food-poisoning test”).

This book was written in the late 80′s but most of the science is still solid. You can really only tell it’s dated by the optimistic mention of an HIV vaccine being developed and ready before the year 2000.

Who Goes First? was an enjoyable read and it would actually make a great supplemental textbook for a college class because it really went through the process of science without sounding like a boring lecture about the Scientific Method. Many of these scientists were interested in the Why and How, and they viewed self-experimentation as a necessary evil to find their answers. The scientists had different reasons for why they did what they did, but the mostly boiled down to: reliability (because they could control everything in their lives); dependability (many of them had fine observational tools); the sense of adventure; developing a sense of empathy for their patients/future experimenters; self protection (if you’re in an area full of malaria, you want to be the one who has first access to the vaccine); convenience (no committees to approve, no forms to sign); and experience (in their own specific scientific field).

There are a few problems with self-experimentation though, and a big one is that it’s difficult to design an experiment with proper controls and to account for the placebo effect. In fact, some of the scientists died in vain because the data they produced did not actually prove their hypothesis. Another issue is that most of the self-experimenters were men, thus scientific facts gained from the experiments may not always be true for women. An example of this issue is in one of the later chapters where a man and woman were experimenting with loss of salt through sweating, and when they determined that women did not sweat as much as men (and therefore didn’t lose as much salt), they decided to move forward with male-only subjects, so their data was not representational of the general public. Lastly, if one is going to self-experiment, one needs to document everything and have a good, observational partner. The chapters mainly focus on the successes of self-experimenters and how lucky many of them were to elude death in their trials, but the last chapter does mention scientists who weren’t so lucky, even if they took what they thought were proper safety measures.

Next book club is on November 6th at 3pm and the location is TBD (although it probably will be near Harvard, we are ironing out some details with a place that we have in mind). We will be reading World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks. If you don’t think this book is science or skepticism related, well, it’s Halloween and zombies are relevant to almost anything. Zombies eat brains. Scientists work with brains. Skeptics use their brains. It’s a natural connection!

The book sneak preview for the meeting after the next one is: Packing for Mars: The Curious Life of Science in the Void by Mary Roach. See you next time!