The Best American Science Writing 2003

by Sacks, Oliver W.; Cohen, Jesse

• ISBN13: 9780060936518
• ISBN10: 0060936517
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-09-01
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

The articles in this anthology represent the finest works of science journalism from 2003, culled from periodicals like "Harper's, The New Yorker, Esquire, Scientific American, Wired," and the "New York Times."

Author Biography

Oliver Sacks is the author of nine books. He is clinical professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, as well as a regular contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and numerous medical and scientific journals. He lives in New York City Jesse Cohen is currently senior executive editor at Atlas Books, a division of W. W. Norton. He lives in New York City

Table of Contents

Introduction	vii
Oliver Sacks
The Forest Primeval	1	(25)
Peter Canby
1491	26	(23)
Charles C. Mann
The Learning Curve	49	(19)
Atul Gawande
A World of Their Own	68	(20)
Liza Mundy
The Melody Lingers On	88	(8)
Floyd Skloot
The World's Numerical Recipe	96	(6)
Frank Wilczek
Emergent Realities in the Cosmos	102	(4)
Marcelo Gleiser
Scientists Reach Out to Distant Worlds	106	(5)
Natalie Angier
Here There Be Dragons	111	(4)
Margaret Wertheim
Notes from a Parallel Universe	115	(8)
Jennifer Kahn
Shadow Creatures	123	(9)
Michelle Nijhuis
You Dirty Vole	132	(6)
Gunjan Sinha
Stalking the American Lobster	138	(22)
Trevor Corson
Fighting Chance	160	(8)
Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Big Bloom	168	(8)
Michael Klesius
Why Turn Red?	176	(6)
Susan Milius
The Mosquito's Buzz	182	(4)
Thomas Eisner
Got Silk	186	(8)
Lawrence Osborne
Disorders Made to Order	194	(10)
Brendan I. Koerner
An Embarrassment of Chimpanzees	204	(9)
Joseph D'Agnese
Common Ground	213	(9)
Danielle Ofri
Why Buy That Theory?	222	(6)
Roald Hoffmann
Big Trouble in the World of ``Big Physics''	228	(9)
Leonard Cassuto
Hawking's Breakthrough Is Still an Enigma	237	(6)
Dennis Overbye
Stephen Jay Gould: What Does It Mean to Be a Radical?	243	(8)
Richard C. Lewontin
Richard Levins
About the Contributors	251

Excerpts

The Forest Primeval

From Harper's Magazine

Nouabalé-Ndoki is one of the most remote places on Earth - seventeen hundred square miles of nature preserve in a hard-to-reach region of the Republic of Congo. Stephen Blake, an English zoologist for whom the word "intrepid" seems an understatement, has made several monthlong journeys, on foot, through Nouabalé-Ndoki--undeterred by lack of modern amenities, the threat of disease, and the presence of poisonous snakes - to track its remarkable population of elephants. The writer Peter Canby accompanies Blake on what is to be his last trip and observes a scientist at home at the edge of the world.

I've just reached Makao, the most remote village in the Republic of Congo. I'm traveling with Stephen Blake, a British wildlife biologist, in a thirty-foot, outboard motor-powered pirogue - a dugout canoe - following the muddy, weed-clotted Motaba River north from its confluence with the Uban-gui River. At first, after leaving the Ubangui, we passed small villages hacked out of the forest, but for a long time we've seen swamp interrupted only by the odd fishing camp: small bird nest-like huts and topless Pygmy women in grass skirts waving their catch forlornly as we motor by.

But now we've arrived at Makao, the end of the line, the last town along the Motaba. Ahead is pure, howling wilderness. Makao has a population of perhaps 500, half Bantu and half Bayaka - among the most traditional Pygmy tribes in Africa. The village long had a reputation as a poaching town, one of the centers of the extensive and illegal African "bushmeat" trade, which, in the Congo basin alone, still accounts, annually, for a million metric tons of meat from animals that have been illegally killed. But since 1993 the poaching in Makao has all but ceased, and the village has taken on another significance: it is the back door to the Nouabalé-Ndoki forest. Nouabalé-Ndoki is named for two rivers, only one of which actually exists. The name of the existing river - Ndoki - means "sorcerer" in Lingala, the lingua franca of much of the two Congos. Nouabalé doesn't mean a thing. It's a misnomer for another river, the Mabale, inaccurately represented on a geographer's map in the faraway Congolese capital, Brazzaville.

Nouabalé-Ndoki is now a 1,700-square-mile national park known chiefly for having the least disturbed population of forest life in Central Africa. No one lives in the park, or anywhere nearby. Nouabalé-Ndoki has neither roads nor footpaths. It contains forest elephants, western lowland gorillas, leopards, chimpanzees, forest and red river hogs, dwarf and slender-snouted crocodiles, innumerable kinds of monkeys, and nine species of forest antelope, including the reclusive sitatunga and the supremely beautiful bongo. The southwest corner of the park is home to the famous "naive chimps" that sit for hours and stare at human intruders. Until biologists arrived just over ten years ago, few of these animals, including the chimps, had ever encountered humans.

Blake studies elephants. A self-proclaimed "working-class lad" from Dartford, England, Blake read zoology at the University of London; he is now working on a doctoral thesis about the migratory patterns of Nouabalé-Ndoki forest elephants at the University of Edinburgh. Thirty-six, fit, and lean, Blake is known as a scientist who likes the bush and is not afraid to go where wild animals live. But he's also considered audacious, a biologist who thinks nothing of crossing wild forests clad in sandals and a pair of shorts. Richard Ruggiero, who runs the elephant fund for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and worked with Blake just after the park was established, compares him to nineteenth-century explorers: "He's someone who could walk across Africa, turn around, and then be ready to go back again." Another colleague described encountering him as he emerged from a long stint in the bush. "He was wearing torn shorts and a tattered T-shirt. He had a staph infection but seemed completely happy."

As part of his research, Blake has taken a series of what he calls "long walks" - foot surveys that start in Makao and follow a web of elephant trails up the Motaba and Mokala rivers to the park's northern border, cross the park from north to south, and then emerge from the headwater swamps of the Likouala aux Herbes River below the park's southern border. (The gorillas of the Likouala aux Herbes were the subject of Blake's master's thesis at Edinburgh.) Each of these treks - and Blake has made eight - covers about 150 miles and takes about a month. When I joined him, Blake was preparing to embark on his ninth and final trip along his survey route. I had heard of Blake's work from Amy Vedder, a program director at the Wildlife Conservation Society, which, along with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Columbus (Ohio) Zoo, funds his research. Vedder and I had been discussing the toll that the region's wars have taken on its wildlife when she told me about Blake's long walks. I signed on to accompany him on his last one. At the time, it seemed a rare opportunity to see the Earth as it was thousands of years ago, at the moment when humans lived side by side with the great apes from which they evolved.

But now that I've reached Makao, I'm wondering why I made no special preparations for this trip. All the perils, which seemed theoretical before I left, have become disturbingly real. Not only don't we have phones or any means of communication; we also face threats of dengue fever, deadly malaria, the newly resurgent sleeping sickness, and even AIDS and Ebola, which are believed to have emerged from the forests of this region. I'm also afraid of army ants, ticks (eventually one crawls up my nose and inflates just at the top of my nasal passage), swarms of flies, and, above all, snakes ...

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Best American Science Writing 2003 by Oliver Sacks Copyright © 2003 by Oliver Sacks
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.