The Best American Science Writing 2002

by Ridley, Matt; Cohen, Jesse

• ISBN13: 9780066211626
• ISBN10: 006621162X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-08-15
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

The Best American Science Writing 2002 covers the full range of scientific inquiry -- from biochemistry, physics, and astronomy to genetics, evolutionary theory, and cognition.

Table of Contents

Introduction	ix
Matt Ridley
Dr. Daedalus	1	(20)
Lauren Slater
Crimson Tide	21	(13)
Atul Gawande
The Made-to-Order Savior	34	(20)
Lisa Belkin
A Desire to Duplicate	54	(18)
Margaret Talbot
Medicine's Race Problem	72	(11)
Sally Satel
The Thirty Years' War	83	(21)
Jerome Groopman
The Soft Science of Dietary Fat	104	(20)
Gary Taubes
Brothers with Heart	124	(12)
Joseph D'Agnese
I Love My Glow Bunny	136	(15)
Christopher Dickey
Rethinking the Brain	151	(20)
Michael Specter
Penninger	171	(18)
Mary Rogan
Mothers and Others	189	(13)
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
Of Altruism, Heroism and Nature's Gifts in the Face of Terror	202	(5)
Natalie Angier
Pirate Utopia	207	(9)
Julian Dibbell
Code Red for the Web	216	(9)
Carolyn Meinel
What Brings a World into Being?	225	(14)
David Berlinski
Quantum Shmantum	239	(8)
Tim Folger
Shadow Science	247	(12)
Oliver Morton
Can Science Explain Everything? Anything?	259	(14)
Steven Weinberg
The Eco-Optimist	273	(6)
Nicholas Wade
George Divoky's Planet	279	(28)
Darcy Frey
About the Contributors	307

Excerpts

Lauren Slater

Dr. Daedalus

From Harper's Magazine

Whether it's a skin graft for a burn victim or a face-lift for an aging movie star, plastic surgery works in the realm that most affects our identity: our appearance. The writer and psychologist Lauren Slater profiles a plastic surgeon in Massachusetts whose radical ideas go well beyond the cosmetic - and confront our basic sense of what it means to be human.

Part I: Beautiful People

Joe Rosen, plastic surgeon at the renowned Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, and by any account an odd man, has a cold. But then again, he isn't sure it's a cold. "It could be anthrax," he says as he hurries to the car, beeper beeping, sleet sleeting, for it's a freezing New England midwinter day when all the world is white. Joe Rosen's nose is running, his throat is raw, and he's being called into the ER because some guy made meat out of his forefinger and a beautiful teenager split her fine forehead open on the windshield of her SUV. It seems unfair, he says, all these calls coming in on a Sunday, especially because he's sick and he isn't sure whether it's the flu or the first subtle signs of a biological attack. "Are you serious?" I say to him. Joe Rosen is smart. He graduated cum laude from Cornell and got a medical degree from Stanford in 1978. And we're in his car now, speeding toward the hospital where he reconstructs faces, appends limbs, puffs and preens the female form. "You really wonder," I say, "if your cold is a sign of a terrorist attack?"

Joe Rosen, a respected and controversial plastic surgeon, wonders a lot of things, some of them directly related to his field, others not. Joe Rosen wonders, for instance, whether Osama bin Laden introduced the West Nile virus to this country. Joe Rosen wonders how much bandwidth it would take to make virtual-reality contact lenses available for all. Joe Rosen wonders why both his ex-wife and his current wife are artists, and what that says about his deeper interests. Joe Rosen also wonders why we insist on the kinds of conservative medical restraints that prevent him from deploying some of his most creative visions: wings for human beings; cochlear implants to enhance hearing, beefing up our boring ears and giving us the range of an owl; super-duper delicate rods to jazz up our vision - binocular, beautiful - so that we could see for many miles and into depths as well. Joe Rosen has ideas: implants for this, implants for that, gadgets, gears, discs, buttons, sculpting soft cartilage that would enable us, as humans, to cross the frontiers of our own flesh and emerge as something altogether ... what? Something other.

And we're in the car now, speeding on slick roads toward the hospital, beeper beeping, sleet sleeting, passing cute country houses with gingerbread trim, dollops of smoke hanging above bright brick chimneys; his New Hampshire town looks so sweet. We pull into the medical center. Even this has a slight country flair to it, with gingham curtains hanging in the rows of windows. We skid. Rosen says, "One time I was in my Ford Explorer with my daughter, Sam. We rolled, and the next thing I knew we were on the side of the highway, hanging upside down like bats." He laughs.

We go in. I am excited, nervous, running by his bulky side with my tape recorder to his mouth. A resident in paper boots comes up to us. He eyes the tape recorder, and Rosen beams. Rosen is a man who enjoys attention, credentials. A few days ago he boasted to me, "You shouldn't have any trouble with the PR people in this hospital. I've had three documentaries made of me here already."

"Can I see them?" I asked.

"I don't know," Rosen answered, suddenly scratching his nose very fast. "I guess I'm not sure where I put them," and something about his voice, or his nose, made me wonder whether the documentaries were just a tall tale.

Now the resident rushes up to us, peers at the tape recorder, peers at me. "They're doing a story on me," Rosen says. "For Harper's."

"Joe is a crazy man, a nutcase," the resident announces, but there's affection in his voice.

"Why the beeps?" Rosen asks.

"This guy, he was working in his shop, got his finger caught in an electric planer ... The finger's hamburger," the resident says. "It's just hamburger."

We go to the carpenter's cubicle. He's a man with a burly beard and sawdust-caked boots. He lies too big for the ER bed, his dripping finger held high in the air and splinted. It does look like hamburger.

I watch Rosen approach the bed, the wound. Rosen is a largish man, with a curly head of hair, wearing a Nordstrom wool coat and a cashmere scarf. As a plastic surgeon, he thinks grand thoughts but traffics mostly in the mundane. He has had over thirty papers published, most of them with titles like "Reconstructive Flap Surgery" or "Rhinoplasty for the Adolescent." He is known among his colleagues only secondarily for his epic ideas; his respect in the field is rooted largely in his impeccable surgical skill with all the toughest cases: shotgunned faces, smashed hands.

"How ya doin'?" Rosen says now to the carpenter. The carpenter doesn't answer. He just stares at his mashed finger, held high in the splint.

Rosen speaks softly, gently. He puts his hand on the woodworker's dusty shoulder. "Looks bad," he says, and he says this with a kind of simplicity - or is it empathy? - that makes me listen. The patient nods. "I need my finger," he says, and his voice sounds tight with tears. "I need it for the work I do."

Rosen nods. His tipsiness, his grandiosity, seem to just go away. He stands close to the man. "Look," he says, "I'm not going to do anything fancy right now, okay? I'll just have my guys sew it up, and we'll try to let nature take its course. I think that's the best thing, right now. To let nature take its course."

Excerpted from The Best American Science Writing 2002 Copyright © 2002 by Matt Ridley
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.