“Measuring the world” – Daniel Kehlmann

What a fantastically funny read! “Die Vermessung der Welt” is two biographies in one, lovingly weaving together the lives of Carl Friedrich Gauß (Gauss) and Alexander von Humboldt, both of whom lived and changed German science in the late 18th and early 19th century.

Both men, as good scientists, had an obsession with knowledge. Humboldt, tiny and possibly homosexual Prussian aristocrat with a famous older brother and a thirst for adventure, without much talent for human interaction, tirelessly and with little regard for his fellow travellers, measured most of South America, in the process accidentally tasting human flesh, forming strange attachments to a stray dog, mapping the canal connecting the Amazon and Orinoco rivers and stealing human corpses. Gauß, from a poor family and reliant on patronage, impatient with the slow wit of everyone else he met, at least partially aware of the social faux-pas he committed, turned his mind to several big mathematical problems at a time and completed his masterpiece, the Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, in his early 20s, and was known as the prince of mathematicians.

Kehlmann’s genius lies in the exclusive use of indirect speech between all of his characters, which creates a comical distance between reality and these extraordinary protagonists although I cannot vouch for the English translation as I read this book in German.

This book has to be taken with a pinch of salt, however, as some liberties appear to have been taken with facts and many anecdotes are so droll they must have been invented by the author. But the alternating (and then joining) chapters of Humboldt versus Gauß are so hilarious and the characters Kehlmann shapes so infuriatingly strange and German that I personally wouldn’t care if it was pure fiction.

“Dragon Hunter” – Charles Gallenkamp

“Dragon Hunter” is the account of Roy Chapman Andrews’ Central Asiatic Expeditions in the 1920s and reads like part biography, part adventure fiction. If Indiana Jones is a hero of yours, you should know that Andrews has often been suspected to be the model for this “indomitable archaeologist-adventurer” and you will probably enjoy this book very much.

Andrews  “possessed an entrepreneurial spirit of sweeping dimensions”, which made his career illustrious and incredibly successful, but he was also a hugely popular socialite in New York and in the foreign colony in Peking where he spent many happy years planning and carrying out his expeditions. Andrews’ friendships and acquaintances included those with a Russian prince, the mother of Czar Nicholas II as well as the owner of a high class Yokohama brothel, while his first wife Yvette was a close friend of Prussian princess Viktoria Luise.

While Andrews’ legacy, the Central Asiatic Expeditions, were borne out of his desire to explore the unknown, their scientific validation came from mentor Henry Fairfield Osborn’s racist theory that Asia must be the cradle of humankind and civilisation, as an African origin of man seemed “decidedly unpalatable”. Andrews therefore sets out to find the “missing link” in the Gobi desert. As biographers often do, Gallenkamp states this latent racism and moves on without much judgment. When the expeditions did not turn up any human fossils, this was outweighed by the volume of dinosaur and extinct mammal fossils they unearthed and the lack of support for any theory of human evolution was not considered a failure.

An educational side effect of this book is the insight the reader gains into Mongolia’s history and culture at the start of the last but also preceding centuries. A never-ending tug-of-war between Russia and China along with a rich religious history and the influences of nomads and immigrants make this land-locked country feel like the heart of Central Asia. Despite some unflattering remarks about the natives by the explorers (unmoral, dirty, adulterous, without compassion for the dying), some friendships develop between Mongols, Chinese and the American explorers, but for the most part, the foreigners living in Peking, including Andrews and his fellow scientists, shut themselves away into a happy enclave, remarkably insensitive and oblivious to China’s political upheaval in the 1910s, 20s and 30s and “learned to steel [themselves] against the civil unrest and atrocities that occurred almost daily”, like public executions. Battling Chinese warlords and corrupt Mongolian governments mean the expeditions end after a few years, buried in red tape and xenophobic (or anti-colonial) attitudes.

Andrews’ scientific achievements were significant and some of the fossils found by his multi-disciplinary expeditions shed a lot of light on mammalian evolution. The reason he was so enormously popular in his time was probably due to his “flamboyant nature”, charisma and love of adventure which he managed to convey to a huge audience. Gallenkamp concludes wistfully: “in terms of romance, daring, and sheer audacity, we will never see the equal of his grand adventure again.”

Read this if you have ever wished you were born when there was still a few blank spaces left on the maps of the Earth.

“Biohazard” – Ken Alibek

“Biohazard” walks the line between popular science and terrifying cold war politics: it is a blood-curdling account of the Soviet Union’s bioweapons research program, written by Ken Alibek (or Kanatjan Alibekov, before defection), its deputy director and foremost scientist.

I read this during my search for useful quotes for my PhD thesis (which is not on bioweapons!) and couldn’t put it down because I needed to know whether he would end with a reassuring “and that was the end of all our evil mass destruction science”. He didn’t. This book caused quite a stir in 1999, when it was released and Alibek’s main point, beside a need to confess the sins of his past, is to warn the West that Russia and other parts of the former USSR still had much more advanced agents of biological warfare than anyone could imagine.

A lot of this book describes the workings of the Soviet machine, inter-relations between different directorates, agencies and organisations, vicious political blackmail and Cold War diplomacy, and that can be a little confusing for the politically disinterested. Then there are Alibek’s descriptions of the strains of Ebola and Marburg viruses, anthrax, smallpox, tularemia and many other deadly pathogens his Biopreparat institutes were working with and they leave little to the imagination: how much damage could have been done and the horrible deaths people would have died in the event of a biological attack. If the animal testing wasn’t graphic enough, there were also the occasional accidental outbreaks in the testing facilities that killed workers and residents.

Despite his responsibilities and actions, I ended up liking Alibek, as he slowly comes around to once again “honoring the medical oath [he] betrayed for so many years”.

I was a child in West Berlin when the Wall came down and had always seen Mikhail Gorbachev as some sort of gentle and peaceful hero of unification and therefore was distraught to read that he signed off on “the most ambitious program for biological weapons development ever given to our agency”, including funding for a “viral reactor to produce smallpox at the Russian State Center of Virology and Biotechnology”, the facility known as Vector, that is still one of only two centers in the world today legally holding a stock of smallpox.

This book made me so uneasy and should everyone, and I’m not sure I recommend it – only to those with a strong stomach and a sunny optimistic disposition.

“Race, Culture and Intelligence” – Richardson and Spears (ed)

I bought this book at a sale for 50 cent, mainly because of its title and the fact that it was published in 1972. I was hoping for some shocking opinions rife with racism so that I could write about them here and possibly ridicule them. But unfortunately (for me, but fortunately for the 70s as a decade,) it is a fairly enlightened collection of essays by a bunch of sensible scientists, social and real (kidding), that are putting up solid arguments against the followers of Galton-like racism masked as science.

These essays are drawn from three areas concerning intelligence research; psychology, biology and sociology, and the conclusions drawn by the 15 writers all seem to agree that a) an IQ score is a terrible way to measure something as complex and manifold as intelligence and b) it is likely going to be impossible to separate any potential genetic influence from the environmental factors involved in shaping the mind of a human being.

One contributor, John Hambley, points out that insisting on genetic variability to be dismissed (for any trait) gives the “very dangerous impression that recognition of any genetic difference among members of the human species necessarily implies inevitable distinctions, that are judged on an axis of superiority-inferiority.” Instead “variability is a biological resource to be valued”.

I still found some leftovers of 70s vernacular; amazing how unacceptable expressions like “Negroes” and “mongol subnormals” have become. I particularly enjoyed the outdated references to the expected size of the human genome, then shrouded in mystery – it “may consist of as many as five to ten million genes”.

“On Seeing” – Frank González-Crussí

Hmmm… this book should not really be reviewed here but in an equivalent Popular Art setting. Having read a review in Nature I got mildly interested but my expectations of cool eye-related trivia and perhaps even the odd optical illusion in print were sorely disappointed. Instead, I found something like “the eye through the ages in poetry and paintings” mixed in with accusations of how people love to see the indecent.

Suiting the subtitle “Things seen, unseen, and obscene”, the first chapter discusses female genitals and how men have often risked death to get a glimpse, as, rather grandly, “Man senses in Woman the insatiability of the ocean, the mystery of the night, and the unfathomableness of infinity.” (And I thought they were just horny.) We then move on to other shock topics such as watching birth, death, defecation and autopsies.

I was a little irritated at the extremely formal and convoluted language González-Crussí uses, exemplified in his refusal to call his “ocular globe” a simple eyeball, and once, he actually uses the royal “we”! He also doesn’t always call a spade a spade when it comes to exposing pseudoscience of centuries past.

I did enjoy reading this book, however, for the many short stories with (sometimes unremarkable) visual references the author summarises and the occasional scientific reference. The reason for feeling uncomfortable when we catch someone staring at us, for example, might be “an atavistic remembrance of a danger sign that [...] meant that we were being watched by a predator”.
Also, it is true that a picture may be worth a thousand words but it never actually says them and we always see what we want or expect to see – it is merely “a dumb sign that an event of some sort has taken place, or that something exists – or has existed – that looks like the image captured by the camera.”

“The Devil’s Doctor” – Philip Ball

Although this biography of Paracelsus starts as a promising guide to medicine and magic in the late middle ages, finishing it turned out to be almost as painful as one of the crude surgery practices described therein.

Philip Ball, a former editor for Nature, introduces Paracelsus, renegade doctor, occasional skeptic, devoted Christian, dabbler in magic, would-be reformer of medicine, boastful megalomaniac, self-styled theologian and passionate alchemist, as a living paradox. There are dozens of contradicting viewpoints that remain of Paracelsus’ writing, outlining a character increasingly difficult to categorize as either “buffoon or genius”, as Ball points out even in his acknowledgements.

Paracelsus was a traveling medic and surgeon (quite distinct professions in those times) with questionable medical qualifications, who made enemies wherever he went. His religion, according to Ball, “might be best described as reformist in spirit, Catholic by default, and wildly unorthodox in practice.” He was “struggling to do something like science with a miner’s coarse lexicon and the mind of a poet”, never actually making a discovery that is still valid today, yet he single-handedly “started a medical revolution and founded a chemical tradition”. He had views about everything, calling Luther and the Pope’s arguments equivalent to “two whores debating chastity”, likening himself to Jesus and setting out dos and don’ts for young doctors: useful (possessing a “gentle heart and a cheerful spirit”), interesting (“should not be a runaway monk, should not practise self-abuse”) and perplexing (“must not have a red beard”). Most importantly, he tried to save lives, more often failing than not, but nevertheless being better at it than most of his contemporaries. Paracelsus advocated the use of personal experience, local cures (determined by astral influences, unfortunately) and his home-made drugs over the outdated recommendations of Galen.

This is not merely, or perhaps even mainly, a biography. Ball presents an account of Renaissance magic and science that is at times much too detailed and drags on for at least four chapters too many, peppered with relevant Paracelsian facts wherever appropriate. Then again, why not? We have here a person who seems to bind together, by his traveling route and larger-than-life nature, conflicts, wars, kings and the birth of a new religion, so maybe using Paracelsus’ life and journeys like a red thread through Renaissance Europe is a great idea. If only it wasn’t quite such a long thread.

“The Happiness Hypothesis” – Jonathan Haidt

Its title smacks of self-help and its bright yellow smiley-face cover made me hide it in public but The Happiness Hypothesis is a hugely interesting and pleasant book that I can’t stop talking about. Haidt promises to put “ancient wisdom and philosophy to the test of modern science” and covers a number of areas in philosophy, psychology, sociology and evolution.

Haidt’s one-sentence meaning-of-life answer I’ll leave for the reader to discover but it is not nearly as exciting as some of the happiness-related insights he shares along the way. My favourite idea, as all others derived from convincing psychological experiments, is that people are happiest in a “state of total immersion in a task that is challenging yet closely matched to one’s abilities”.

The author’s metaphor of choice for the way our minds work is that of a wild elephant (our urges and passions) with a semi-able rider (our reason). Our mind also has a nifty feature called the interpreter module that will fabricate often ludicrous explanations for our own behaviour when an experimenter tricks us into making subconscious decisions. We learn another few unpleasant things about how our brains work such as our negative bias: “bad is stronger than good”. When making decisions, one negative aspect typically outweighs several positive ones, such as in a relationship where “it takes at least five good or constructive actions to make up for the damage done by one critical or destructive act” or in preparation of a meal where “food is easily contaminated (by a single cockroach antenna), but difficult to purify”.

You can also find in this book the origins of disgust and how a sometimes healthy fear of bodily functions led to frankly ridiculous religious notions about the impurity of women; a vindication of gossip, which may have been the reason for the evolution of language and without which there would be chaos and ignorance because it “extends our moral-emotional toolkit”; and a recap of the Platonic idea for the origin of love.

Aside from the occasional common sense agony-aunt spin on, for example, different types of love, there is a nice chapter about Love and Attachments, in which Haidt equates passionate love with a dangerous drug: “People are not allowed to sign contracts when they are drunk, and I sometimes wish we could prevent people from proposing marriage when they are high on passionate love”.

The main messages to emerge from Haidt’s entertaining, clever and convincing research all sound true (if a little familiar) and are a great summary guide to becoming a happier person: Look after your social contacts, attempt to raise your base level of contentment in one of three equally effective ways (meditation, cognitive therapy or Prozac) and add variety to spice up your life. We don’t need to follow several religions’ advice to forsake all external pleasures as the right type can positively influence our happiness.

Maybe this is a bit of a self-help book but one that comes guilt-free for the skeptic as it provides adequate and refreshing scientific backup.

“Is Pluto a planet?”, David Weintraub

No, apparently. Or at least there isn’t a meaningful definition in sight that will make Pluto a planet without also including about 15 other objects in our solar system. Although Weintraub eventually comes down on this inclusionist side, the overall taste the book left in my mind was: No, Pluto is just a large Kuiper Belt object.

“Pluto earned its status as a planet by accident”, we learn, because the people who happened to find it were really wanting to find one to explain the supposed differences in Uranus’ and Neptune’s predicted and observed orbits by the new planet’s gravitational tug. They saw Pluto, called it a planet and the name stuck.

This book raised more questions for me than it provided answers, which I really enjoyed. For example: Could you measure the parallax of a train that looks like it is moving when you are on the one pulling away? How come I didn’t know that the Moon does not actually orbit the Earth but they both orbit a point very close to the centre of the Earth? Who named Pluto? Can you observe the change in planets from prograde to retrograde motion or is it theoretic? Why were the moons of Mars called Fear (Phobos) and Panic (Deimos)? Answers, anyone?

Weintraub takes the reader on a tour through astronomy’s history and while he is very thorough I was hoping for a style slightly more awe-inspiring, given the suitable topic. Thinking about Pluto’s moon Chiron and its likely fate of a change in orbit, “perhaps directly into the Sun or onto a collision course with Earth or Jupiter or Saturn” – this is the kind of spine-tingling sense of foreboding you can only really get from astronomy and I love it.

“Madame Curie”, Eve Curie

This is the second biography of a scientist I’ve read, this one written by a family member – Marie Curie’s daughter, who, incidentally, died at the age of 102 while I was reading this book. The close relationship between subject and author had all sorts of implications. Most noticeably, this is probably the most thorough and personal book about the double Nobel laureate anyone was ever likely to write.

Eve Curie, born when her mother was 37 and her father was to live only 16 more months, naturally mentions the scientific achievements of Madame Curie, and goes into great detail on her attitude to work, but the physiochemical ins and outs of the discovery of polonium and radium (or any other of Marie Curie’s works) are largely glossed over. Since I am not well versed in physics or mathematics this suited me fine and from the start I was taken captive by the life of the Polish student who adores her family and her country but is unable to pass the opportunity of studies in France.

I became engrossed as in a novel, waiting excitedly for the chapter entitled “Pierre Curie”, where the serious and hard-working heroine meets the love of her life. The love story between her parents is described tenderly by Curie and if not textbook romantic, it is certainly fulfilling and extraordinary.

It is odd and possibly intentional how the biography progresses when Pierre Curie dies in a traffic accident. Up to this point, Marie’s life was recounted chronologically and in minute detail, while afterwards her years blend into each other. Moods and events in the physicist’s life are described in a seemingly arbitrary order and her sorrow of having lost her husband is palpable.

Coincidentally I was reading this book while in Paris and found myself on an accidental secular pilgrimage: depressed at the street corner where Pierre died, enjoying the view in the street where Marie spent the last years of her life, and even unexpectedly found that their bodies had since been moved to the Panthéon, the resting place of the people France is most proud of.

Eve Curie’s arcane writing style (the book was first published in 1937) throughout evokes the admiration for her famous mother, without euphemising her flaws. Madame Curie is portrayed as a highly intelligent and motivated woman with no great natural skills for housework or personal friendships and no time for leisure. She raised her daughters sometimes controversially (the elder, Irène, also won a Nobel prize later, so her methods can’t have been all wrong) and scorned all publicity and anything that would distract her from science. Her religious views changed from Catholic, raised by a pious mother, to the view expressed in the following excerpt from a letter to her cousin.

“Let everybody keep his own faith, so long as it is sincere. [...] I respect sincere religious feelings when I meet them, even if they go with a limited state of mind.”

In fact, the many examples of Marie’s writing, her direct quotes and letters addressed to her, are among the highlights of the book. As a young woman she writes down the beautiful headstrong motto: “First principle: never to let one’s self be beaten down by persons or by events”. At the height of her undesired fame she points out to a journalist how “In science we must be interested in things, not in persons”, and this seems to sum up her character well.

Unusual events from Marie Curie’s life that I had never heard of include her friendship with the royal Belgian couple and her creation of an X-ray lab on wheels servicing military hospitals during the first World War.

Despite this intimate book, Madame Curie remains alien to me, she is unlike anyone I have met in real life. But maybe therein lay the appeal, for me and all those she inspired during her lifetime.

“Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code”, Matt Ridley

I enjoyed this book immensely! Biographies of brilliant people might be a completely untapped source of reading pleasure for me. Surely, a lot of it is due to Ridley’s easy style and entertaining anecdotes; I have only read his “Genome” and can’t remember how I felt about it, but I’ll definitely read more of his works in the future.

But what I loved the most was finding out about this astonishing man, who I always thought had stood in Watson’s shadow, which was apparently not the case at all.

I was so enamoured with Crick by half-way through the book that I was totally shocked by the revelations about his radical views (at least he held them in the 1960s and 70s) on races, eugenics and sterilisation of “genetically inferior” people. I don’t know what to do with this information and it seems like neither did Ridley. It is mentioned dutifully but the author doesn’t really take a position and maybe that is not the job of a biographer. As I uneasily read on about this man with the incredible imagination, admiration gained the upper hand again and by the end I cried when he dies.

The fact that Crick was a raging (yes!) atheist helped, of course, but the main reason for liking him is expressed in this last sentence of the epilogue: “He would have liked to find the seat of consciousness and to see the retreat of religion. He had to settle for explaining life.”