Books

Spook is the third of Mary Roach’s books that I’ve read this summer. As with her other two books, Spook examines the scientific approach to the paranormal phenomena, such as hauntings and psychics. The history of paranormal investigation is fascinating, including exposure of mediums at the turn of the century. Some of the claims made (a woman giving birth to rabbits?!?) read like Weekly World News headlines.

Mary tackles the topic from the perspective of genuine curiosity, not blind belief or rigid skepticism, which I appreciate. She explores possibilities, such as the effects of infrasound and electromagnetism on human perception. While Bonk is still my favorite of her books, Spook is a pretty good read.

John Hawks, a biological anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, has a recent review of Spook as well.

After reading Bonk, I was curious about Mary Roach’s other books, so I reserved them at the library. I chose to read Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers first. Basically, Mary was exploring the options of what to do with your body when you die.

Burial is certainly the most common choice, but for those that donate their body for research, there are a myriad of options, not just being a cadaver in an anatomy lab. She went to the University of Tennessee’s Body Farm to find out exactly what happens to a human body after death, when left to its own devices. Some can end up in the embalming lab at mortician school, or as practice heads for plastic surgeons, or as crash test dummies. She found others in the Harvard Brain Bank, and thought that might be a possibility:

My reasons for becoming a brain donor aren’t very good at all. My reasons boil down to a Harvard Brain Bank donor wallet card,which enables me to say “I’m going to Harvard” and not be lying. You do not need brains to go to the Harvard Brain Bank — only a brain.

What she wanted was to be a brain in jar, a la Abby Normal in Young Frankenstein. She was disappointed to discover the brains sliced and stored in rubbermaid containers in a lab refrigerator.

While this book is not for the squeamish, it’s definitely an interesting read, and gives the reader plenty to think about. Instead of embalming, how about compost?

This was one of my Half-Price Books finds that had been gathering dust in my to be read pile for several years. I had tried reading it once, got bored, and put it away. But when I picked it up at the end of the semester, I really couldn’t put it down.

The Lost King of France tells the story of the son of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, Louis-Charles, who was imprisoned in the Temple along with his parents and older sister during the Revolution. The tale is similar to what happened to the Romanovs in Russia at the turn of the 20th Century, but was one I had never heard. I knew, of course, that King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette had been beheaded by Robspierre’s government, but not that their children remained imprisoned for years after their parents’ deaths.

Their daughter, Marie-Therese, was released (and exiled) in 1795, but her brother had been secluded years before, and rumors ran riot that he had been smuggled safely out of the Temple. As with the Romanovs, there were pretenders to the throne, which Marie-Therese never openly acknowledged, due in part to the official record stating that the dauphin had died in the Temple in 1795. But no one was really sure what had happened to him. That is, until 2000, when geneticists analyzed a tissue sample from a child’s heart, reportedly taken from the Orphan in the Tower during the autopsy by the attending physician.

This was a great read, engaging, and combining two of my favorite subjects, history and genetics. Better still, it demonstrates how genetic analysis can be used to answer historical questions, unequivocally.

Simon Mawer’s Mendel’s Dwarf examines the ethical implications of genetic research through a fictional account of the discovery of the achondroplasia (dwarfism) gene. The title character is Dr. Benedict Lambert, a geneticist who also happens to be a dwarf and a distant nephew of the father of genetics, Gregor Mendel.

The novel skips between Ben’s research and Mendel’s work. The historical part of the novel was much more interesting to me, being the history of my field. The modern sections spent a little to much time focused on the one part of Ben that was “normal-sized,” and as a result, Ben isn’t a likable or sympathetic character. The actions in his personal life overshadow his work and accomplishments.

The novel did give me the opportunity to think about my field in a new way. I had heard before the Darwin never read Mendel, but it hadn’t occurred to me that Mendel probably ready Darwin. On the Origin of Species was a famous book, not just in England but likely on the continent as well, so it makes sense that Mendel had access to it, given his interests.

Mention is made of the Russian geneticists who were prohibited from studying Mendel by the state, whose policy considered nurture above all, with no place for the possibility that some traits might be inherited. Those scientists who refused to toe the party line were either shot, imprisoned, or exiled to Siberia, some for upwards of 15 years. Scientists in the US have faced similar censorship in recent years, though not yet with such drastic results.

Mawer also draws parallels between the eugenics movement at the turn of the 20th century and modern “family-balancing” techniques, allowing parents to choose the sex of their offspring. He sees a slippery slope here, with genetic counseling being not so different from “purifying the genome” through ethnic cleansing. As a geneticist, I’m not sure I agree. But it’s definitely an issue worth examining, as we are only just beginning to consider the ethical implications of Mendel’s work.

Overall, the book is interesting, though it may make the reader uncomfortable. I think that, ultimately, may be Mawer’s intent.