Portrait of the human as a tangled bank: A review of "I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life"

It’s time we became friends with microbes. And not just with them but with their very idea, because it’s likely going to be crucial to our lives on this planet and beyond. For a long time most humans have regarded bacteria as a nuisance. This is because we become aware of them only when something goes wrong, only when they cause diseases like tuberculosis and diarrhea. But as Ed Yong reveals in this sweeping, exciting tour of biology, ecology and medicine which is pregnant with possibility, the vast majority of microbes help us in ways which we cannot possibly fathom, which permeate not just our existence but that of every single other life form on our planet. The knowledge that this microbial universe is uncovering holds tantalizing clues to treating diseases, changing how we eat and live and potentially effecting a philosophical upheaval in our view of our relationship with each other and with the rest of life.

Yong’s book shines in three ways. Firstly it’s not just a book about the much heralded ‘microbiome’ – the densely populated and ubiquitous universe of bacteria which lives on and within us and which rivals our cells in terms of numbers – but it’s about the much larger universe of microbes in all its guises. Yong dispels many misconceptions, such as the blanket statements that bacteria are good or bad for us, or that antibiotics are always good or bad for us. His narrative sweeps over vast landscape, from the role of bacteria in the origins of life to their key functions in helping animals bond on the savannah, to new therapies that could emerge from understanding their roles in diseases like allergies and IBD. One fascinating subject which I think Yong could have touched on is the potential role of microbes in seeding extraterrestrial life.

The universal theme threading through the book is symbiosis: how bacteria and all other life forms function together, mostly peacefully but sometimes in a hostile manner. The first complex cell likely evolved when a primitive life form swallowed an ancient bacterium, and since this seminal event life on earth has never been the same. They are involved in literally every imaginable life process: gut bacteria break down food in mammals’ stomachs, nitrogen fixing bacteria construct the basic building blocks of life, others play critical roles in the water, carbon and oxygen cycle. Some enable insects, aphids and a variety of other animals to wage chemical warfare, yet others keep coral reefs fresh and stable. There’s even a species that can cause a sex change in wasps. Perhaps the most important ones are those which break down environmental chemicals as well as food into myriad interesting and far-ranging molecules affecting everything, from mate-finding to distinguishing friends from foes to nurturing babies’ immune systems through their ability to break down sugars in mother’s milk. This critical role that bacterial symbiosis plays in human disease, health and even behavior is probably the most fascinating aspect of human-bacteria co-existence, and one which is only now being gradually teased out. Yong’s central message is that the reason bacteria are so fully integrated into living beings is simple: we evolved in a sweltering, ubiquitous pool of them that was present and evolving billions of years before we arrived on the scene. Our relationship with them is thus complex and multifaceted, and as Yong demonstrates, has been forged through billions of years of messy and haphazard evolution. For one thing, this therefore makes any kind of simple generalization about them almost certainly false. And it makes us realize how humanity would rapidly become extinct in a world suddenly devoid of microbes.

Secondly, Yong is adept at painting vivid portraits of the men and women who are unraveling the secrets of the microbial universe. Old pioneers like Pasteur, Leeuwenhoek and Koch come alive in crisp portraits (for longer ones, I would recommend Paul DeKruif's captivating classic, "Microbe Hunters"). At the same time, new pioneers herald new visions. Yong crisscrosses the globe, from the San Diego Zoo to the coral reefs of Australia to the savannah, talking to adventurous researchers about wasps, aphids, hyenas, squid, pangolins, spiders, human infants and all the microbes that are intimately sharing their genes with these life forms. He is also a sure guide to the latest technology including gene sequencing that has revolutionized our understanding of these fascinating creatures (although I would have appreciated a longer discussion on the so-called CRISPR genetic technology that has recently taken the world by storm). Yong’s narrative makes it clear that innovative ideas come from the best researchers combining their acumen with the best technology. At the same time his sometimes-wondrous narrative is tempered with caution, and he makes it clear that the true implications of the findings emerging from the microbiome will take years and perhaps decades to unravel. The good news is that we're just getting started.

Thirdly, Yong delves deeply into the fascinating functions of bacteria in health and disease, and this involves diseases which go way beyond the familiar pandemics that have bedeviled humanity throughout its history. Antibiotics, antibiotic resistance and the marvelous process of horizontal gene transfer that allows bacteria to rapidly share genes and evolve all get a nod. Yong also leads us through the reasonable but still debated 'hygiene hypothesis' which lays blame for an increased prevalence of allergies and autoimmune disorders at the feet of overly and deliberately clean environments and suburban living. He discusses the novel practice of fecal transplants that promises to cure serious intestinal inflammation and ailments like IBD and Crohn’s disease, but is also wary about its unpredictable and unknown consequences. He also talks about the fascinating role that bacteria in newborn infants’ bodies play when they digest crucial sugars in mother’s milk and affect multiple functions of the developing baby’s body and brain. Unlike proteins and nucleic acids, sugars have been the poor cousins of biochemistry for a long time, and reading about their key role in microbial symbiosis warmed this chemist's heart. Finally and most tantalizingly, the book describes potential impacts that the body’s microbiome and its outside guests might have on animal and human behavior itself, leading to potential breakthrough treatments in psychiatry. The real implications of these roles will have to be unraveled through the patient, thoroughgoing process that is the mainstay of science, but there is little doubt that the arrows seem to be pointing in very promising directions.

“There is grandeur in this view of life”, Darwin said in his magnum opus “The Origin of Species”. And just how much grandeur there exactly is becomes apparent with the realization that Darwin was dimly aware at best of microbes and their seminal role in the origin and propagation of life. Darwin saw life as an 'entangled bank' full of wondrous species: I can only imagine that he would have been enthralled and stupefied by the vision of this entangled bank presented in Ed Yong's book.

The difference between popular chemistry and popular physics

This is from Half Price Books in Redmond, WA which I visited over the weekend. In this world popular physics books are popular physics books. Meanwhile, popular chemistry books are just textbooks.

Of course, as I have noted earlier, the problem is not with Half Price Books or with any other bookstore where this will be a familiar scenario. It's really with the lack of popular chemistry literature compared to popular physics fare, much of which also happens to be repetitive and marginally different from the rest. The great challenge of chemistry is to make the essential but (often deceptively) mundane exciting and memorable.

In a nutshell, the belief is that physics and biology seem to deal with the biggest of big ideas - quantum reality, the origin of the universe, black holes, human evolution - that are largely divorced from everyday experience while chemistry deals with small ideas that are all around us. But the smallness or bigness of ideas has nothing to do with their inherent excitement; witness the glory and importance of the Krebs cycle for instance. In addition, the origin of life is chemistry's signature "big idea". Plus, a conglomeration of small ideas in chemistry - like the evolution of methods for the refinement of various metals or the revolution engineered by polymers - underlies the foundation of civilization itself.

All I can do is point to my list of top 10 favorite chemistry books. Fortunately the occasional chemical splash continues to provide rays of light.

We need new models of popular physics communication

One of the issues I have with Steven Weinberg's list of 13 science books is that they showcase a very specific model of science writing - that of straight explanation and historical exposition. Isaac Asimov was very good at this model, so was George Gamow. Good science writing is of course supposed to be explanatory, but I think we have entered an age where other and more diverse forms of science writing have made a striking appearance. Straight, explanatory science will persist, but in my opinion the future belongs to these novel forms since they bring out the full range of the beauty and pitfalls of science as a quintessentially human endeavor. And since writing is only one form of inquiry, we also need to embrace other novel forms of communication such as poetry and drama.

Why do we need other models of science communication? The problem is best exemplified by popular physics and that is what I will be writing about here. As I have written earlier, one of the issues with today's popular physics writing is that it has sort of plateaued and reached a point of diminishing marginal returns: there are only so many ways in which you can write about relativity or quantum mechanics in a novel way. There are literally hundreds of books on these topics, and yet another volume that clearly explains the mysteries of quantum mechanics to the layman would not be especially enlightening.

Thus, among the most recent science books that buck this trend is one I have truly savored - Amanda Gefter's "Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn". The book breaks new ground by not just recycling cutting-edge facts about the universe but by presenting these facts engagingly in the form of a very charming memoir about a daughter and a father (disclaimer: although I know Amanda in real life I had been entranced by the book before I met her). Amanda's book is among the very best I know in the "scientific memoir" category, and the particular model that she has pursued in the book - that of a non-scientist determinedly and rewardingly threading her way through the evolution of her own scientific interests - is a very fruitful one which others should emulate.

There is also the more familiar model of the scientific memoir written by leading scientists themselves. The best instance of this that I have encountered is Freeman Dyson's "Disturbing the Universe" which combines a world-renowned scientist's way of thinking with a genuine literary flair. Very, very few people lie at the intersection of "highly accomplished scientist" and "highly accomplished writer", and Dyson fits the bill better than almost anyone else. There is also Laura Fermi's delightful "Atoms in the Family" that provides a rare glimpse into her husband Enrico's human side. Among the other physics/mathematics memoirs that I have truly enjoyed are Stanislaw Ulam's "Adventures of a Mathematician", Marc Kac's "Enigmas of Chance" and Emanuel Derman's unique and timely "My Life as a Quant". Also while we are on the subject of memoirs, a fictional memoir that projects great poignancy is Russell McCormmach's "Night Thoughts of A Classical Physicist" which vividly portrays the resignation of a classical physicist in the face of the destruction of deterministic physics by the indeterminism of quantum theory, even as the political landscape in Germany around him itself is mirroring this destruction.

What I find most striking though is a model of science writing in which science intertwines seamlessly with fiction. I am not talking about science fiction here of which there is plenty - instead I am referring to volumes that explain science through fictional devices and characters. This genre is often called 'scientific fiction' to distinguish it from science fiction. One of the best examples of this style that I know concerns two of mathematician John Casti's books. "The Cambridge Quintet" is a work of scientific fiction that brings five leading thinkers - C. P. Snow, Alan Turing, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Erwin Schrodinger and J. B. S. Haldane - together at Snow's residence for a dinner conversation on artificial intelligence. The other book titled "The One True Platonic Heaven" pits a similar set of fictional but plausible conversations between the brilliant minds at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, this time on epistemology and the limits of scientific knowledge. Both books are gems and deserve a wider audience. 

Another set of fictional conversations between the founders of quantum mechanics is vividly captured by Louisa Gilder's book "The Age of Entanglement". The book is somewhat unfair to Robert Oppenheimer, but otherwise it's unique. And among more recent volumes, one that I have thoroughly enjoyed is Tasneem Zehra's Husain's delightful "Only the Longest Threads" which explores the origins and philosophy of modern physics in the form of letters between two protagonists set against the background of the discovery of the Higgs boson. The book provides a particularly charming example of the human face of science and the beauty of scientific ideas. However, if animals seem more charming to you than human beings, I would recommend two of Chad Orzel's books, one in which he pitches relativity to his dog and another in which the dog has to be at the receiving end of the mind-bending paradoxes of quantum theory.

Then there are the truly fictional works of science enshrined in the form of plays, poetry and even an opera. The opera is "Doctor Atomic" and it's quite unique - I can never get the image of actor Gerald Finley singing John Donne's "Batter my heart, three person'd God" in his baritone voice out of my mind. My earliest exposure to science in the form of fiction though was through Michael Frayn's wonderful "Copenhagen" which charts an imagined set of conversations between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg during a real encounter between the two in September 1941. Frayn's writing is often poetic and he brings out the parallels between principles from physics and the mysteries of human nature without venturing into New Age territory. Another sparkling play along the same lines is Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia" which explores the beguiling paradoxes of time and thermodynamics. And speaking of time, nothing I know - absolutely nothing - surpasses the sheer lyrical prose and wondrous temporal constructions in Alan Lightman's "Einstein's Dreams".

Ultimately as we know, a picture is worth a thousand words, so we cannot depart from this brief overview of novel forms of physics communication without mentioning the graphic novel. My favorite is probably "Logicomix" which describes Bertrand Russell's obsessive quest for mathematical truth. Then there is the literally scintillating "Radioactive" which brings Marie and Pierre Curie's love and science to life in truly creative graphical form. Jim Ottaviani has been a particularly prominent proponent of embodying physics in comic book form, and among his creations are my favorites "Feynman" and "Suspended in Science". Jonathan Fetter-Vorm's "Trinity" which is about the first atomic bomb test is also definitely worth your time. In one panel graphic novels can sometimes convey the reality of science as a human endeavor more powerfully than entire paragraphs, and I have little doubt that this medium will continue to serve as a potent form of science writing.

This little tour of the myriad faces of popular physics - physics as poetry, physics as drama, physics as fiction, physics as comic characters - brings out the sheer diversity of incarnations that the story of physics and its practitioners can adopt when being narrated to a wide audience. Together they speak to the nature of physics as something real done by real human beings. The image of popular physics as a set of explanations of the wonders of the cosmos communicated through explanatory writing is a valid one, but there is so much to be gained by embedding this image amidst a kaleidoscopic variety of other forms of science communication. It's something we can all look forward to.

Note: As I was putting the finishing touches on this post I became aware of a post by Chad Orzel on Forbes documenting similar novel forms of science writing. Gratifyingly we both seem to hit on some of the same themes.

Top 10 popular chemistry books for the general reader

An aerogel, one of the wonders of modern chemistry
described by Mark Miodownik in "Stuff Matters"

Steven Weinberg - with whom I once had the great pleasure of sharing a panel on 'Big Science' - has noted a list of 13 of his favorite science books for the general reader in an interview with The Guardian. It's a perfectly respectable list (and it includes my all-time favorite book) although it suffers from a few issues, such as being more historically oriented and not being broad enough. 

But as usual, the other big limitation of the list is that it contains no chemistry books. This wouldn't be the first time a popular science list has excluded chemistry - chemistry is the black sheep of the sciences when it comes to popular writing, even though modern life would be unimaginable without it, as would the puzzle of the origin of life. Given Weinberg's physics background this is somewhat understandable and it's his personal list after all. However I thought I would add my two cents to the discussion by offering my own modest list of chemical titles which I think would delight and inform the general reader, along with some biomedical research sprinkled in. Feel free to add your own in the comments.

1. Oliver Sacks - "Uncle Tungsten": Oliver Sacks recently wrote a wonderful and poignant editorial in the NYT about his imminent fate, but the good doctor should rest supremely assured. All his writings are memorable and will live on forever, and none so much in my opinion as his delightful romp through the wonders of chemistry as a child narrated in "Uncle Tungsten". I myself grew up experimenting with hazardous chemicals, and so this book resonated with me like few others. The book is a paean not just to the magical world of chemistry as explored by a young and receptive mind but also to a nostalgic and charming time when one could buy a pound of each alkali metal from a hardware store and drop it in a lake to see what happens (as Sacks did).

2. Deborah Blum - "The Poisoner's Handbook": This volume is a riveting account of the sinister side of chemistry, and of human nature in general, as it manifested itself in the heyday of New York City during the Jazz Age. Blum is exceedingly accomplished at bringing out the devious motives of poisoners as they exploited the unique chemistry of each poisoning, and she is also very adept at chronicling the rise of forensic science as it pitted science against murder. Thankfully science has largely won that fight - Blum tells us how. If there's any doubt about how chemistry can come alive and impact society in the most consequential and personal ways, this book should dispel that doubt.

3. Natalie Angier - "Natural Obsessions": Angier's book is a rare example of an underexploited and revealing science genre; what one might call "fly on the wall science". In this case the particular wall belongs to the laboratory of Robert Weinberg at MIT. Weinberg is one of the most important cancer researchers of the past fifty years and his lab has discovered many of the most important genes and biochemical pathways involved in the spread of this diabolical disease. Angier does a really great job of documenting the everyday struggles, passions, pitfalls, blind alleys and triumphs of basic research. Science done by human beings, with all its warts and glories.

4. Barry Werth - "The Billion Dollar Molecule": Another true fly on the wall account, Barry Werth's book would get anyone interested in the fast-paced, high-stakes world of drug discovery and biotech research. It is quite definitely the best and only book I know in which a probing, highly articulate writer was allowed virtually untrammeled access to the secret world of cutting-edge research carried out by a major, upcoming company (Vertex Pharmaceuticals). Werth's prose is breathless, vivid and Promethean and makes the scientists at Vertex alternatively look like Gods descended from Olympus and rock stars at Woodstock. While he takes some poetic license, nowhere else have I seen the real world of highly risky and lucrative drug research and the sheer passion of industrial scientists described with such loving care and attention to detail. A must read, along with its less stratospheric but still readable sequel.

5. Philip Ball - "H2O: A Biography of Water": If I had to single out one writer who consistently produces highly readable books on popular chemistry it would be Phil Ball. Phil has written many excellent books on the world of molecules and his writing covers a remarkable range of topics - from Paracelsus to Chartres Cathedral - but in my opinion none bridges the mundane and the profound as well as his book on that most beguiling, commonplace and enigmatic of substances - water. Phil explores an astounding range of phenomena in which water plays a key role, from the water cycle in glaciers to water in outer space to water at the molecular level in the human body. There is also a great chapter on what Irving Langmuir called "pathological science" which describes in gory detail the polywater controversy. This book is a must have on the shelf of anyone interested in popular chemistry.

6. Sam Kean - "The Disappearing Spoon": Just when I thought that popular chemistry books would not become runaway bestsellers, along came Sam Kean with his chronicle of the fun, swashbuckling and sometimes morbid stories associated with the discovery of key elements. Kean focuses mainly on radioactive elements but he also has delightful chapters on other ubiquitous elements like gallium - which is the subject of the title of the book.

7. S. Venetsky - "Tales about Metals" and "On Rare and Scattered Metals": Speaking of elements, one of the delights of growing up in the 90s was the sudden access to hitherto unavailable literary and scientific gems from one of the former Soviet Union's leading scientific publishing companies, Mir Publishers. I discovered Venetsky's wonderful elemental romp through commonplace but still fascinating metals like gold, tungsten and molybdenum in an old used bookstore as a teenager and was stricken. Venetsky is an absolute delight especially when describing the role of coinage metals like copper and gold in history, and his writings are also liberally sprinkled with myths about these chemical wonders as well as descriptions of uses of elements such as 'rare' earth metals in everyday applications like electronics. Venetsky's book is one of those books which would make any boy or girl grow up to be a chemist.

8. Patrick Coffey - "Cathedrals of Science": Biographies of physicists abound but those of chemists are rare. That is why Coffey's book on the epic lives and rivalries of chemists Gilbert Newton Lewis and Irving Langmuir is very much worth a read. Lewis and Langmuir were both the torchbearers of American chemistry during the 1920s, and both made foundational contributions to the discipline. Coffey is at his best while describing their discoveries and the apportioning of credit for those discoveries that became a sticking point between them, their students and colleagues, many of whom included luminaries like Linus Pauling, Walther Nernst and Svante Arrhenius. A great example of the story of science as a quintessentially human endeavor.

9. Roald Hoffmann - "Roald Hoffmann on the Philosophy, Art and Science of Chemistry": Roald Hoffmann is one of those very few Renaissance Men of science who have won a Nobel Prize, written plays and popular books and contributed original ideas to the philosophy of their discipline.  I reviewed this collection of essays by Hoffmann for 'Nature Chemistry' last year. As I describe in that review, Hoffmann is especially adept at telling us how chemistry creates its own emergent philosophy which unmoors itself from its reductionist roots in physics. The book would be worthwhile for this discussion alone, but it also has splendid chapters mulling over the meaning of beauty and elegance in chemistry and the complex face of chemistry when it impacts the environment. A unique contribution.

10. Mark Miodownik - "Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials that Shape our Man-Made world": One of the perpetual complaints that chemists have is that when it comes to popular chemistry, somehow the public manages to achieve the contradictory feat of appreciating chemistry's ubiquitous presence in our everyday life while at the same time completely missing the excitement in the discipline. Mark Miodownik's wonderful new book handily bridges this gap. In a series of revealing chapters dedicated to a range of substances, from the exotic (aerogels) to the utterly mundane and commonplace (concrete), Miodownik brings materials science to life. Imagine writing a book about concrete that treats the substance with the same kind of fascination and wonder that one might treat kryptonium, and you get an idea of what Miodownik's book is like. In one sentence, a role model for what popular chemistry writing should be like.