Maryn McKenna

Journalist and Author

Superbug Summer Books: The Best Science Writing Online 2012

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I’m cheating a bit here, since summer ended before dawn yesterday. But for the last entry in Superbug Summer Books, I wanted to leave you with something recent, and something rich, and today’s pick qualifies twice over: It was released just last week, and it is full — stuffed — with excellent science writing, more than enough to keep you reading until I pick up this intermittent book feature, in adapted form, later this fall.

“The Best Science Writing Online 2012” (Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is the latest in a series begun in 2006 by Bora Zivkovic, now the editor of Scientific American‘s blog platform, and a series of guest editors. The series was originally dubbed “The Open Laboratory” and published independently. This year’s iteration has been brought forward by a major publisher, the new Scientific American imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, with all the extra market legitimacy that suggests.

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Superbug Summer Books:The Fate Of The Species

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I confess: It can get lonely sometimes, being Scary Disease Girl. The universe of people who are deeply invested disease geeks is passionate (thank you, constant readers) but it isn’t that large. And let’s face it, keen interest in things that could bring an end to civilization as we know it — hitherto-unknown pathogens, rampant antimicrobial resistance, nanotechnology run amok — isn’t like to earn repeat invitations to most dinner parties.

So you can imagine how I welcomed the publication of Fred Guterl’s new book, “The Fate of the Species: Why The Human Race May Cause Its Own Extinction And How We Can Stop It” (Bloomsbury), a lean and thoughtful exploration of the possible impact on humankind of scary diseases, and many other potentially  bleak futures. In a series of deeply reported what-if essays, Guterl explores the worst-case scenarios that climate change, species loss, and viruses both real and digital might bring — and what steps we might take now to avert these imagined but plausible outcomes.

A necessary disclosure: Guterl is the executive editor of Scientific American, where I am a columnist on contract. But the book didn’t come to me as a result of that relationship; it was sent to me by a publicist who noticed this books series and had no notion of our connection.

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Superbug Summer Books: Experiment Eleven

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In the history of antibiotics, the creation myth is the discovery of penicillin. In 1928, Alexander Fleming leaves a window open in his laboratory, a breeze blows across his culture plates, and when he returns to retrieve the plates for cleaning, he discovers that tiny specks of mold that have landed on the plates have killed the staph he had been culturing. The mold is Penicillium, and the compound it produces, once refined and reproduced in a laboratory, launches what we think of as the antibiotic era, and changes medicine forever.

But while penicillin jumpstarts antibiotic production, it is another antibiotic — streptomycin — which arguably creates the pharmaceutical industry, by being the first antibiotic to be patented. (The original penicillin never was, due to complications of timing, and also to its developers’ conviction that it belonged to the world.)

The story of the discovery of streptomycin is much less well-known than that of penicillin. But it ought to be much better-known — because as longtime journalist Peter Pringle recounts in a new book, “Experiment Eleven: Dark Secrets Behind the Discovery of a Wonder Drug” (Walker), it contains so much that is so relevant today, not just to the process of drug discovery, but to the conduct of research. If you care about fairness or justice, Pringle’s account of how graduate student Albert Schatz, the actual identifier of the drug, was deprived of recognition — and a fortune in royalties — will enrage you. If you are a junior scientist, I suspect it will give you nightmares.

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Superbug Summer Books: FULL BODY BURDEN

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I started my journalism career as a projects reporter, working on the kind of investigations that involve sitting in windowless rooms for weeks digging through stacks of old documents. One of the investigations I worked on was the ugly history of the Fernald Feed Materials Production Center outside Cincinnati, a 1,000-acre site near the Indiana border that was one of the links in the manufacturing chain for nuclear weapons after the Manhattan Project made them possible. The plant had been run with a sloppiness that seemed incredible — over the years, millions of pounds of uranium had literally vanished up its smokestacks and into the air and groundwater — and residents of the rural area  were convinced it was responsible for what seemed to be an unusually high rate of cancers nearby.

One of the striking things about their stories was how often they admitted they hadn’t known what was going on at Fernald. The water tower was painted with a red-and-white checkerboard, a little like the logo for Purina, and between that and the facility’s uninformative name, the neighbors had gotten the idea that the plant made pet food. When they discovered that it was actually enriching uranium to make fuel cores for plutonium-production reactors, they felt betrayed, and enraged enough to sue — and, eventually, win.

I always wondered what how the neighbors could have been so deceived, or so trusting, for such a long time. A new book, “Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats” (Crown), answered that for me. Kristen Iversen, who is now the director of the MFA creative writing program at University of Memphis, grew up by the plant where Fernald’s “feed materials” eventually ended up: Rocky Flats, which manufactured the plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons, and which was even more dangerously sloppy than Fernald. (A 1969 fire was damped down just as it risked becoming a criticality that could have destroyed the Denver metro area.)

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Superbug Summer Books: THE POWER OF HABIT

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My morning routine is a problem. I work at home: I stumble downstairs, wave goodbye to the spouse and feed the cat, and browse the overnight news while I’m drinking two very strong coffees. About the end of the first cup, I remind myself that I planned to work out this morning. About the end of the second cup, I surface from email long enough to realize that it is an hour later that I thought, and I have missed my chance.

This happens practically daily. The pattern distresses me; I spend a fair amount of effort trying to dislodge it; I fail.

So you can imagine how I latched onto Charles Duhigg’s book “The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life and Business” (Random House). Duhigg is a Times investigative reporter, and his book is a reporter’s book: absorbing, wide-ranging, thorough, deeply sourced, and intelligently analytical about the patterns that people — and organizations and societies — pursue without conscious intent. It is very good, and lots of people think so: The book was published in March and as of this weekend has been on the New York Times’ hardcover nonfiction best sellers list for 19 weeks.

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