Science Friday - Microbes and Art, Science Books 2018. Dec 7, 2018, Part 2

Episode Date: December 7, 2018

Here at Science Friday, our jobs involve reading a lot of science books every year. We have piles and piles of them at the office. Hundreds of titles about biology and art and technology and space, and sometimes even sci-fi. Now, the time has come for our annual roundup of the books we couldn’t forget. We have plenty of picks from you, our listeners, as well as from our panel of expert guests: Stephanie Sendaula of Library Journal Reviews, Deborah Blum of MIT’s Knight Science Journalism Program, and Dr. Eric Topol of Scripps Research. See our favorite science books of 2018 here. Fungi, bacteria and lichens can grow on paintings, monuments, and other types of artwork. They feed on different pigments, oils, and canvas. In a study out this week in the journal PLOS ONE, researchers analyzed a 17th century painting and found microbes that could degrade and others that could protect the painting. Robert Kesseler, the Director of the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute (who was not a part of that study), discusses why microbes like to munch on paintings and what can be done to protect these works of art.     Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hi there, Ira here. You know, the end of the year is right around the corner, and we want to hear your favorite science stories of 2018. What affected you the most? Or was there an interesting discovery that you're still talking about? We want to hear from you. Record a voice memo with your name, city, and what your top story is, and email it to voices at science Friday.com. That's a voice memo, your name's city, and what the top story is. Email it to voices, and what your top story is. email it to Voices at Science Friday.com. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Coming up, our picks for best science books of the year. Looking for that special gift for someone who likes to read books.

Well, we want to hear what you have to suggest. Also, you can tell us by calling us. You can make the call, but only if you make the call. 844-724-8255. That's 844-Sai Talk or tweet us at SciFri. first. When you go to the museum to see a popular exhibit, sometimes you have to fight through the crowds, right, to get up front to see all the details. But there's another group also scurrying around trying to get a closer look at these pieces of art. The microbes, fungi, bacteria,

even lichens like to grow on paintings and monuments, and they can do damage to these artwork. So how do you protect a painting from these microbes? Well, you call in a biologist, and that's my next guest. Robert Kessler is a cell biologist, director of the Smithsonian's Museum Conservation Institute in Suitland, Maryland. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you, Iris. A pleasure to be here. Oh, it's nice to have you. There are microbes crawling around everywhere. Why is a painting a good habit hat for these microbes? Well, any painting or any surface is a great habitat. The microbes are around us all the time in spore form, and when they land on a surface, if there's moisture there, they'll start growing.

So it sometimes happens that our paintings are too close to an outside wall, and they get condensate forming on the back of it, and the microbes that have already landed there will start growing in the water. Within three or four days, you'll get a nice little growth of particularly fungi growing on these things. If you don't, yeah. No, I'm just saying, is there a list of usual suspects that grow on the paintings and the walls? Well, almost any fungus. will grow on them, that they're so good at eating anything that you just put them on a surface.

If there's enough moisture there, they'll start trying to figure out a way to eat it. And what shows up on the paintings in particular? Well, what shows up there, we had a case once of a Chumley painting that was called Autumn. It was an egg tempera on Masonite. And what happened is this was a rolling hill scene with a nice little stream in front. And from a distance, it looked like there was snow, with a light-coated. putting a snow on the hills. And when you got closer, it looked like a fog had rolled in on the hills.

And when you got really close, you could see the fungal hyphy standing up with the fruiting bodies, like little trees. It was absolutely beautiful from a biological point of view. So you loved it as a biologist, but as a conservation person. You didn't want to see that. I was thrilled. And when the curators see me being thrilled about something, they know there's a problem. So when you say a problem, what kind of damage can these microbes do to a piece of artwork?

Well, if you leave them long enough, they'll start eroding some of the pigments or some of the ground or the gesso or even getting onto the cotton substrate. It'll start weakening the surface. And if you let it go long enough, years sometimes, depending on how wood it is, you'll get the paint flaking off the surface. Oh. Is there a special paint they like more than others? Well, they don't like paints that have heavy metals in them, things like lead, copper, zinc, mercury. That tends to slow them down or stop them completely. The acrylic paints, they like, egg tempera they like, because it has so much protein in it.

So they're looking for certain nutrients that they keep them going, nitrogen particularly. If it's an older, the older the painting, is it more edible, delicious to the microbes? Because they don't have the modern stuff in them? Well, the older ones tend to have a lead ground in them, so they tend to be a little more poisonous. But also the ones of the old masters that we see have been around a long time, and they've survived all kinds of things. Usually poor climate control than churches or museums. So they're survivors of a horrible environment and attacked by microbes. Are certain areas on the painting that are more susceptible?

It all depends. Perhaps the edges would be more likely to be attacked first because moisture might get onto those first, and then it would spread from there coming in. But it all depends on where the moisture is coming from. If it's coming through the whole back, well, then the whole front surface is liable to be attacked. Let me ask you more about that John Chumley painting

that looked so beautiful. What was the outcome? What did you wind up doing with that painting? Well, what we wound up doing was that we could not put anything on the surface to kill it. There are some tricks in our tool chest, a biosides that we sometimes use, but anything we were going to put on the surface to kill the fungus would also have interacted with the paint and damaged it. So what we ended up doing was a technique that I developed in the museum world,

which was called a suffocation process using argon gas. So we basically wrapped the object up in a bag, replace the oxygen-rich air with argon, almost pure argon, and let it sit like that, and eventually it dried out a bit. We put it in around 50% relative humidity, so we could bring the humidity down, but the argon, the lack of oxygen stopped any growth immediately, and then we could dry the piece out over time, and that would take the moisture out and stop any future problem. So all the fungal tissue stopped growing, and some of the fungi dies under argon, and then the conservator could go in and just remove it with the temperature.

the Q-tip very easily, well, laboriously, but easily. Wow, cheap tool. Isn't that sort of the same thing you see it? When you go into Washington, you look at the preservation for the great documents of the United States. They're all under Argonne, Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, things like that. Right, and that's because it's so totally inert that we won't get any oxidation going on there.

That was the main reason for doing, not so much insect or fungal control, but more. more for the iron gall ink wouldn't react from, you know, it wouldn't oxidize in air. So it's very nicely preserved. So that's the green glow, you see. Well, you have to put a little charge of it. I think they have, might have green. If you put a current through argon, it'll turn out a little bit blue. It turns like neon.

Yes. It's glowing. Was argon always used as a preservative or were other gases used? Well, sometimes nitrogen is used. It's cheaper, and that's been fairly common. The reason we use argon is it will kill fungal tissue, whereas nitrogen just keeps them alive. So whenever we think we've got fungi there, we want to use argon. What about helium or something like that?

I've tried helium, but it's very difficult to keep that into a bag, and it has such a small molecule. It won't push the oxygen out of the way. So we've got to get that oxygen out, and the argon does a very nice job of doing that. When you have it in a bag, the argon sinks to the bottom, and the oxygen will rise to the top when you just let it sit. Oh, that's a trick of the trade. Yeah, nitrogen does the opposite. Nitrogen will rise to the top, and oxygen will sink to the bottom. Don't want to do that, no.

Right. And usually your object's on the bottom. Details, detail. I know you work to stop an infestation of book lice in a monastery. Tell us about that. Oh, that was quite a fascinating one, that this was the great law for a monastery. in the Helkegee Peninsula and Greece closest to the Bosphorus. And somebody sent me some insects to identify when I was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

and I not only did fungi, but I did insect control. So I looked at these and said, well, these are book lice, okay. But book lice, what are they doing on a book that's in a library? They're supposed to be eating fungi. So why do they have them on their books? So they brought me over to take a look at this. and it was a fascinating experience because it took about 24 hours to get there in different forms of transportation the last being a boat to the vehicle on an island that's the peninsula and then a Jeep

driven by a monk over these rough roads till the middle of the night I arrived at this monastery and I was expecting the western kind of monastery something from umberto echo the name of the rose I had this vision in my head about western medieval kind of structures and this was so different it was Byzantine. The courtyard was a rough stone with grass between it, and most of the structures had a rounded dome on it. It was very, very pretty, very different than what I expected. And there were about a dozen or two dozen monks in this very giant structure. The great lava monastery was built, and it started in the 10th century. It's the oldest monastery on the peninsula, right under the Mount Athos Mountain. And when I got there, I found these about 2,000 rare books they had.

in a 19th century building. And the building was sort of a U-shaped structure. One side had a rare book. The other side had their pieces of very books, the Thessaloniki that they had when they first started at the monastery. But anyway, as I looked at this, there were some, the books had all been put into cloth covers, and the Greek conservators had written on the outside in Greek,

Greek to me, and Greek to them, what the condition of the manuscripts were, whether they needed conservation and so on, and then they put them on shelves against the wall. And I realized the wall were outside walls of the building, and as I looked at the outside of the building, there were no gutters and leaders on the building. So the water was running from rain,

would run down the side of the building, wick up the wall, seep into the inside, and get onto these cotton cloth covers, soak into the books, and then stain the edges of the books with water, and fungus would start growing on the books. So we'd open them up and take a look, and you'd have maybe two or three inch section

all around the books covered with fungi, and that's what the book lice were eating. So the whole problem was water. When you look at what causes, why were these book lice here, you go back to, well, we just put gutters and liters on this building and get the water away from the building. We'll solve our complete problem.

And did they? And it did. Yeah, I ended up treating a few of these with Argon again, the favorite thing, just to show them how to do it and to stop the fungal growth immediately. So you're like a detective then? You have to figure. Well, we do. It is.

We always want to know the cause. When we see a problem, we've got to look at, well, it's not enough just to treat the symptom like a physician. We look at the same thing. They want to know why. They see the symptoms. They want to know what the real cause is. And once we know the cause, we can say, well, how we, we. We have to change that cause because if we solve the immediate problem,

we put it back in the same environment, we'll get the same problem again. Wow. Sounds like we have an interesting job there. It's been very fascinating, you know, led me to go around the world a few times. And we need more people like you because things are getting old all the time. As we are. Absolutely. I can vouch for that.

Thank you, Dr. Kessler. You're welcome. Marbury Kessler is director of the Smithsonian's Museum Conservation Institute. Institute in Suitland, Maryland, right over the border from D.C. We're going to take a break, and it's time for our annual roundup of the best science books of the year we want to hear from you. Give us a call 844-8255. 844 SciTalk, or, of course, as always, you can tweet us at SciFRI. We're going to talk about the best books of 2018, and you'll get some good ideas for holiday books if you're still looking.

And we got our book experts with us. We're going to have Stephanie Sandula, Deborah Blom, and Dr. Eric Topal will be here. And we'll have you, too. So stay with us. We'll be right back after the break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. You know, my job involves reading a lot of science books every year.

I mean, we get, I'm not making this up, we get about 50 to 100 books a week that come into our office. So we have piles of them back at the office. Hundreds of titles about biology, art, technology, space, sometimes even science fiction. That's why it's always fun to pick through the piles for our annual roundup of books that we couldn't forget for Best Science Book of 2018. And all week long, we've been asking you, our faithful listeners, to send us voice memos with your picks. And here's one. My name is Jeff Grant from Batavia, Illinois. And my book recommendation for 2018 is The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs by Steve Brassadi.

Dr. Prasotti writes in a eloquent way that is easy for everybody. to understand, and he sheds new light on dinosaur evolution. It is a must read for all of you dino buffs out there. Me being one of them, it's one of my favorite books of the year. Well, we had this one also from Julie G. in New Jersey. Origin Story by David Christian. It gives you the big history of everything, just like it says. It's really informative, and I'm still picking up the pieces of my mind that it blew while

reading it definitely deserves a second read. Now we've gathered a panel of readers here with us, too, to guide us through year. The year in books, we want to know what they thought about them. Stephanie Sandala, Sandala like New York, Dala. Sandala is an associate at Library Journal Reviews here in New York. She's with us here in our New York studios. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having me, Ira. You're welcome. Deborah Blum, director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT, and author of the Poison Squad, a solid pick.

as we'll be talking about it. Welcome back, Deborah. Thank you. It's great to be back. Dr. Eric Topal, a cardiologist and executive vice president and professor at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California. Good to have you back, Eric. Thanks, Eric. Good to be with you.

And we have a full list of our panel's recommendations and some of mine. You can see them all at Science Friday.com slash best books. So let's get right to it. Stephanie, give us your top pick. My top pick is Spying on Wales by Nick Pinesson. This was a great history of the evolution of whales from the time when they were still had, we're living on land and had four legs

and were the size of small domestic dogs until their time now, one of the largest aquatic animals. I really like how he talked about how we don't actually know much about whales. They're very enigmatic. They live far at sea. They travel deep to places we don't know

when the light doesn't reach. So they're difficult to photograph and tag. So I think the mysterious element and it makes it even more intriguing. That's what I really liked about it, just a curiosity aspect. That's always a good thing. Right.

And I think for us, it was the best book for teens, too, because teens would be interested. Just, you know, his writing is so accessible. It's really fun. It's just like a great introduction to science or to fossils, and it was just a really fun read overall. Eric, what's your top book?

My favorite was Carl Zimmer's. She has her mother's laugh. Carl is well known to anyone follows, Science in the New York Times with Matter, but this I think is his 12th book, and it's a masterpiece. It covers everything about genetics, from the fact we're all mosaics to the microbiome, to having his own genome sequence, and it is done in the most extraordinary storytelling way. So it's just so readable and fascinating, really a great book. Interesting.

Deborah, do you have a pick? Deborah, go ahead. Okay. Hi. Time there. So I've been looking at the pile of books. I brought them all with me here, and so many of them more serious than the one I am going to pick first. But I'm going to start with the mystery of the exploding teeth and other curiosities from the history of medicine by Thomas Morris.

Just every time I dive into this book, I find something I love in it as a portrait of the way we used to think about medicine. both hilarious or just completely horrifying or kind of startling. And this is a book that walks through a whole bunch of case histories from medicine going back into the 1700s and uses facsimiles of the actual papers and quotes the doctors. And today when I was coming over here, I was reading about the warnings for authors in which there was actually a,

medical theory that too much reading melted your brain, and they found a case of a writer who, after he read too much, decided that his body was made of butter, and so he would not get too close to the fireplace in case he would melt. I'm reading this. And literally, I had this moment of sort of heartfelt love for someone who would go so deep into these old scientific journals and papers and let us see how people used to think. Wow, that's a great idea. We should milk.

We're reading too much. Like butter. Let's go to our listeners. Let's see what our first listener has to say about. Let's go to Jackie in Houston. Hi, Jackie. Hi, dear. Great to talk with you, Ira.

I'm a real fan of the show. Thank you. Yes, my book pick is factfulness. by hands, Rosling. And it lists that the 10 reasons we're wrong about the world and why things are better than you think. So in the midst of our political climate and kind of science denial in many areas,

this is using statistics and logic to really open our eyes about how modern science has really been very beneficial for us as a people, rather than us kind of thinking about the doomsday scenario, climate change that were all approaching, even though he does deal with that as well in the book. So it's just a real, I mean, it makes me uncomfortable to read parts of it, which to me is always kind of a sign of a good book. Hmm, that's a great pick.

Thank you, Jackie, for pointing that one out. Did you hear about that one at all? I haven't. I need to look into that one, so I'm getting some pointers from everyone. And Hans Rosling, I mean, he unfortunately died very young. I think it was in the last year. He was such a pioneer in kind of making people think about the evidence that lies behind science. He was really brilliant, and he's a real loss.

I was really excited to hear her mention his name. That's great. I'll just throw in one of my picks for this year, and that was Michael Pollens, How to Change Your Mind. You know, not to be true. It was mind-blowing that book. You know, it was just amazing. Yeah, he's a great writer, one of my favorites, too. So Ira, you think taking acid is okay?

I'm trying to figure this one out. Well, I think he lays out a good case for studying it. Okay. You know, and not in a, you know, in a very controlled atmosphere and not just acid. He goes into rooms, mushrooms and things like that. And how now it is being looked that seriously once again, because, you know, the people who did it in the 60s sort of ruined the science of it. and they're rediscovering it.

So did he make you see validity for the science, Ira, or did he make you want to try it yourself? How do I answer that? I have to say the way he laid it out, it sort of does make me want to try it myself. I mean, in a controlled way. Because I'm just a pure geek, and if I can geekify something, and I know Eric that you're a geek, too. So I followed you. No question. But I'm not trying any of that stuff.

Say, I won't get in an elevator, but I'll try that stuff. So, but it's interesting how, you know, how it's, I just think that the fact that we are now trying it in the way we should have done it or experimented with in the way we should have done it years ago. He sort of opened up that door again. Okay, Stephanie, your second book. Give us your second book. My second book was Rising by Elizabeth Rush. So this one was about climate change, and I like how she puts a really human aspect of it. She goes to Oregon, California, Florida, Louisiana, and Maine, and she lets people talk in their own words.

So some chapters are just people telling their fears, their worries, their concerns. I really liked how she interviewed people who are Native American living in Louisiana, whose homes are on stilts, because the bayou and the ocean are now one and the same. And instead of having shrimp and fish, they see dolphins in the area around their home. home. So she just really gives a great personal overview of climate change and how it's affecting people. Yeah. And that's maybe the right book at the right time. Exactly. Yes. Yes. Because I think we're actually seeing some movement at climate change. Yes. Finally, after all these years. Let's go, let's go to the phones. We'll go around, around Robin Circle. Let's go to John in Santa Fe.

Hi, John. Hi, Ira. Hi there. Go ahead. Yes. My favorite was chasing new horizons. the book about the Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto by Alan's Turn and David Grinspoon. Right, right. Great book. We had them on talking about it. Yes, yes. And I teach astronomy at Santa Fe Community College and had encouraged my students to also delve into the book as well. It's just exciting the entire process and the whole pursuit of,

discovery. Yeah. Thanks for that recommendation. Eric, what do you think about that? Well, the book after the next book I was really keen on was bad blood. This book is

the story of Theranos, the massive fraud that occurred by the journalists who broke it at the Wall Street Journal of John Carrier. What's amazing about it is it took them almost a year to be able to get these disgruntled, brave employees to come forth and tell their stories.

because of the threat of what would happen in their careers. And then it really delved into things that we hadn't actually even known about, which was how patients were getting erroneous lab tests, and then they were being suppressed by the company from telling their story to this journalist. So it's an amazing, shocking story of a company that was just engaged and just more fraud that anyone could ever imagine. I think that was the theme of the book.

There's going to be a movie about it, and I think, as I understand it, Jennifer Lawrence is playing Elizabeth Holmes, so that ought to be pretty interesting. Deborah, are you familiar with that book? Yeah, it's a fantastic investigation. And Kerry, you won the Pulitzer Prize for the Wall Street Journal with the original investigation and then parlayed it into a book. And I heard him talk at the Online News Association,

and the efforts by the people that there are in us to silence, everyone, including him, is an incredible part of the story. It's a story of journalistic courage, among other things. So true. Yes, that was one of our long list, top ten picks, too, for science and technology. It's just a great reporting and a great, interesting story. Yeah. It's a lot of good reporting going on these days.

A lot of digging up of stuff. That's what we hadn't heard about. Let's see what kinds of digging up we can do on the phone. Let's go to Rick in Centennial, Colorado, one of my favorite places. I love the name. Well, thank you, Ira, and thank you for having me on and giving me a chance to advocate for a book that I just absolutely loved reading earlier this year, which is a book called Endurr. And then the rest of the title, I just think is perfect.

Mind, Body, and the curiously elastic limits of human performance. a Canadian author, Alex Hutchinson, and he gets some help from Malcolm Gladwell, who writes the foreword, really using Nike's work with Kipchogi to try to run a sub-two-hour marathon. He really dives into what we know and what we don't know

about why some humans are able to perform at such a high level and why some aren't. And I love this book in particular because at 48 years old and competing in triathlon, I look for absolutely anything that is both scientific and interesting to engage my mind. But this moves from being sort of bench research to being clinical because I was able to take and apply

a lot of what I read in this book into how I approach my own training. And I think anyone during this holiday season who is shopping for an athlete, you already know they're quirky and geeky and all of the rest of it impossible to shop for. So I think I've made your shopping easy.

Just give them a copy of this and watch them scurry off into the corner and get all excited. So I don't know if any of your guests or yourself have read the book yet, but it's a fascinating area of science where the biomechanical and the psychological come together. All right, Rick, we got

you sold it. You sold the book. Yeah, this is Science Friday from WNYC, We're talking about Best Books of the Year with Stephanie Sondala, Deborah Blum, and Dr. Eric Topol. Deborah, give us your next pick on the list. I'm going to kind of lump two of mine together because they both deal with climate change here. One of them is Chesapeake Requiem, which is about the vanishing nature of Tangier Island out at the edge of the Chesapeake.

And the other is in search of the canary tree. by Lauren Oaks, which is about one tree in Alaska, the yellow cedar, which is sort of both of these are climate change stories. The Tangier Island, which has been the home to fishermen in Chesapeake Bay forever, is literally disappearing due to rising waters, and the warmth that is occurring in Alaska is starting to erase the yellow cedar. And they're very different books. I picked them both because I think climate change is the biggest story of our lives, the biggest, the scariest, the most important, the most immediate.

And so Chesapeake Bay is the story of this community of fishermen on this tiny island who are dealing with the disappearance of everything they've known and who mostly don't want to deal, right? Which I think we often do. So it's a wonderful microcosm of sort of the human interaction with the changing world. Not a cheerful one necessarily, whereas in search of the canary tree, I loved because in the end, it's buoyant, right? It's not about the resilience of even imperiled species and the importance of taking care of them. and it's almost like a little slideshow of interactions. She puts up a post-it note, what does this tree have to teach me?

And she follows that for eight years, and as she takes you through the lessons of the tree, it gives you a lot more faith in people and their willingness to care and to learn than I think some of us feel when we look at that climate change problem. And while I'm still going on, she's a gorgeous writer. a poetic writer, and I just wanted to read this one line.

Please. If fear is the absence of breath, and faith is a positive fourth, I want to breathe into an uncertain future. And she uses that to kind of set up how she wants us to think about the changing planet and the importance of being in the now and trying to take care of it. It's a lovely book. Wow. Can't get a better recommendation than now.

We're going to take a break and come back, chat more about your favorite books, our number, 844-8255, as they say in the trade. We have open lines. You can get in. 844-7-24-8-255. You can also tweet us at SciFry, talking with Stephanie Sandala, and associate editor at the Library Journal Reviews.

Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and director of the Knights Science Journalism program at MIT, and author of The Poison Squad. She's not recommending her own book. Stephanie is, I think it's kind of rare. Eric Topol, cardiologist, and executive vice president, and professor at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, a geek just like I am, but he does it really well.

We're going to take a break. We'll be right back after this break, so you don't go away. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking about the best science books of the year with our panelists Stephanie Sandala of Library Journal Reviews. Deborah Blum of the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT and Dr. Eric Topal of Scripps Research. And we're getting suggestions from you out there. Our listeners also, let me play a couple of them. Here's one that. landed in our inbox earlier this week. This is Steve in Seattle, and I recommend the promise of the Grand Canyon, John Wesley Powell's perilous journey and his vision for the American West.

In addition to being just an exciting read about Powell's journey through the Grand Canyon, it also addresses his being way ahead of his time in dealing with issues that we're still addressing today. Land use issues, environmental issues, the government and private industry. I think it's a great read. Thanks a lot. You're welcome. I mean, that was very interesting. Yeah, I really like that one. Environmental history. So that was one of your... Yeah, that was one of your... Yeah, that was what... I really liked that one also, so. What made you like it so much?

I think I'm just really interested in environmental history, and especially now Land Use of such a, you know, a popular topic that we're still thinking about and even more so now. So it's still really relevant, so it's very accessible, too. Right. Maybe you like this pick from Laura in Boulder. I wanted to recommend Ben Goldfar. book, Eager, The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter. It'll just completely make you rethink what a natural stream should look like. What a great idea. That's a great endorsement.

I love that. Did you know that book? I did not, but I think beavers are really fascinating. So now I'm going to put that on my list. I'm adding some to my list. Our readers strike our listeners strike again. It's always good to get some. some suggestions. And if you have a

suggestion, our number 844-8255, also you can tweet us at SciFri. You know, I'm waiting for some listener to come up with some sort of science of cooking book. Every once in a while in the year, we haven't done that one yet, maybe someone. Unless Debra, you know of one that you want to suggest, or Eric or Stephanie.

No, all the recipes I know will kill you, Eres. You have trouble. having people coming over to eat at your house. Constantly, actually. Oh, yes. Would you taste that first before you give it to me? Deborah, how is your book doing this year? It's been, actually, it's been really exciting to see it end up on a lot of great lists this month.

New York Times Notable Books and Smithsonian named it one of the ten best science books of the year, and Bustle named it one of the 25 best nonfiction. books of the year period, which was really exciting. I told my friends it's the only time of my life I'm ever going to be on the same list as Michelle Obama. The day that I sell two million copies of a book in two weeks, I will retire. I'll bet you don't. I know you.

Stephanie, do you read that book? I haven't read it yet, but it's on my list. I swear to Deborah. You have to say that, right? Yes. Eric, let's go to you. What's your next pick? Well, I have two that I put in the physician author category that are quite extraordinary.

First, Sandeep Jahar is a cardiologist, and he wrote a book called Heart, A History. And it's quite remarkable because it tracks the big milestones in the field of cardiology. And even though I was familiar with many of them, he tells them in a way that's just quite extraordinary. and he also gets into his own personal familial issues with heart disease. The other one by Mona Hannah Attisha is just an amazing book. She's a pediatrician in Flint and she was the one that broke the whole lead in the water poisoning there. And she's a hero. I mean, she just was persistent and she challenged the local government and authorities and she

just basically exposed it all, just what she had done for Flint, Michigan is just amazing. Yeah, I love that book. I was so glad to see that. It was on your list, and she is a hero. And one of the things I think people who don't know that story don't realize is how, and the first defensive reaction by Michigan and state and city officials and even the EPA, people did their very best to destroy her reputation and make her testimony not count.

And she stood up. She's incredibly brave and dedicated. Absolutely, Deborah. No question about it. It's always interesting. Your first pick about Sanjeepe's book on The Heart. Is he a cardiologist? Yes, in New York City, yes.

You know, we've seen these stories where cardiologists or other doctors, they come down with the very illness that they are a specialist in. Yes. And we've gone through a few cardiologist books over the years, and the interesting part about these books is they'll tell you, I'm just as scared as you are, and I'm the doctor. Right. Right?

Exactly. Did that happen in this book? Well, this was in his family, not him. Yeah. It certainly could hit him in the years ahead. He's pretty young. Let's see if we have any tweets that have come in about things that people wanted to hear's one. Caugh on Twitter says, Tangle Tree, they must read in a deep enjoyable one at that.

It's not only a great recounting of how science works. also doesn't have a tidy ending, also like science. That's David Quamman's book. You know, he's a gorgeous writer. I mean, if you go back and look at sort of the landscape of his work. He's such an amazing stylist. So I'm glad to see that come up. Stephanie, you're nodding a lot.

Yeah, I am too. I'm glad to see that on a list. He is a great writer, and he just makes science so fun and so, you know, available to people. Do you find any trends that you look at a lot of books, Stephanie? Yes. Are there any trends that you can? can pick out during any year. They're going in this direction or that direction. We are seeing a lot more environmental books. I think climate change just in general has sparked

publishers to think more about publishing books about how weather is impacting us and we're impacting weather. So just trends like that I'm seeing a lot more of. Let's see if we can go to the phones. Lots of people with some interesting comments. Let's go to Cordelia in Wilmington, North Carolina. Hi there. Hey, thank you for taking my call. I just want to recommend as my favorite sci-fi novel of the year, Job herself, by Joseph Cadotte. It is an epic space opera. It's set off planet far in the future, and it is very compelling characters and a very almost Shakespearean plot of loss, revenge, and also.

of redemption. Wow. And I just thought it was highly, it was highly original. And as a bonus, it was a few things I thought, which is really interesting, was that it is a book that features a prominently African-American family. And it's just something you don't typically, I mean, as it's just as it happened, the author literally did it as a roll of the dice to determine where they were from in ethnicity. But it just happens that, you know, it's like, well, see, I realized when I read it, like, I've never seen that before. So I just thought it was a very original voice. Yeah, we like science fiction here because, you know, it's a window.

Thank you for the recommendation. Anybody? Do you have a comment? Oh, no, it's like science fiction, too, so I was nodding along. All right, let me go back to our questions because we have a question that was emailed to us from Leslie in Parma, Ohio, who says, How about science books for science honor students in high school? My grandson is taking science. and I don't know what to buy him.

Let's hope he's not listening right now. Maybe he's getting a book. Right. Do you have a suggestion? Well, my next recommendation was actually nine pints. So it is about blood, but it isn't squeamish or anything. So Rose George, British journalist, reminds us that blood is mysterious and it's feared, but it isn't something we should be afraid of.

And I think her writing is really great for high school and adults. She does talk about floodletting and leaching a little bit, but it isn't gross or anything. But she mainly talks about how people, like the private plasma industry, and people are donating plasma and blood for money, which is really fascinating. And it's just a really great way to approach science and medicine and the combination of the two. I think that would be a great start for high schoolers.

Yeah, we had the author on. She's a wonderful writer. Yes, she's great. She is, and her book on shipping, I think that was the previous book, just rock. Cat Warren, this book is not this year's book, but she wrote a book called What the Dog Knows, that just came out in paperback last year and is going to come out in a young adult edition sometime this coming year.

And it's a really great, you know, not a warm, huggy, fuzzy book, but a really smart, interesting book about how dogs think and how they interact with humans. And to briefly blow, I hate to do this, this is so embarrassing in a way, But Poisoner's Handbook, which was the book I did previously, is becoming kind of a book of choice for high school chemistry teachers. And last year I went and talked to the National Association of High School Chemistry Teachers, and this year I'm talking to do different high school chemistry groups about that book. And I want to say that not just because, you know, poison and murder is accessible, but because I love the idea of taking

these kinds of books, Kat's book or my book or Rose's book, and using them to remind people in the K-12 system how cool science is, right? I think that's really important. I would throw in one. I have a recommendation for

it, actually, because you've expanded to other years. I have that recommendation for the dialogues, which came out last, you know, November a year ago, but we didn't talk about it with Clifford Johnson until January. And it is a you know, it's a graphic novel

about science. Dialogues, the conversation is about the nature of the universe. It's just absolutely amazing book. I need to read that one. I mean, it's just the issues that they get into, and it's just two people or a group of people in a graphic novel sitting and discussing stuff, you know, and in conversation

that you might have in a cafeteria where he places some of his characters. It's really well written. I read your description on the website I read, I thought I am so getting that book. It just sounds. Yes, you sold me too. Consensus.

It is, yeah. Do you have, Eric? What's the next on your list? Well, actually, it fits in well with the science honors question. The Book of Why by Judea Pearl. It's an amazing book that dissects the cause and effect story in science. And it really makes you think. It's a lot like Danny Kahneman's thinking,

and slow. It moves you to think in system two as far as how you should start. There's so much stuff that's written that associations and people jump to that this is the cause and effect story. And of course, it's so difficult to prove. And this is about a thorough interrogation of the science of cause and effect as you could ever imagine. It's a beautiful book. Oh, that's great because, you know, people don't know what science is. They have a misconception of how Science is done. Maybe this will help out. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. On Myra Flato, we're talking about our best books of 2018 clocks ticking down.

Let's see how many. It's Christmas Tree on the board again. Let's go to Pegg in West Central Florida. Hi, Peg. Hi, Peg. How are you? Fine. How are you? Go ahead. Okay, so I was fortunate enough to go to Ocala this spring and hear James. Britschione talk about his new book, The Flavor Matrix.

And the subtitle of this book is the art and science of pairing common ingredients to create extraordinary dishes. So he paired with the supercomputer Watson to come up with all kinds of flavor pairs. I did get my cooking book. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. So how to make these great? dishes with different flavors and he used Watson to do it.

Correct. Correct. And one of his favorites was chicken and mushroom burgers with strawberry ketchup, which I haven't tried yet, but I'm going to. How could a computer be wrong? Right. Thanks, Peg. Thanks for saying that.

I knew somebody would rescue me. Yeah, that's, you know, it's one of the one. We like to do the arts and, you know, part of science here. It's steam instead of stem. So I'm glad someone threw that in. And any chance we get to use a cooking book or anything like that, we won't. Let me turn it back to you. Okay.

What do you think, Stephanie? Oh, yeah, that sounds great. I'm not sure about the strawberry ketchup, but I'll try the chicken and mustard. So my last pick was a dinosaur artist by Paige Williams. I know, Deborah, you liked it too. I did. This was just really great narrative nonfiction. Her writing is just incredible.

She describes Eric Procopi and his organization Florida Fossils. He was an avid fossil collector, and he entered the for-profit fossil trade, so he was prepping fossils, selling them to auctions. And this story, we follow him across the world. He's going to, like, China, Japan, and eventually he ends up in Mongolia, where he obtains a fossil. And the whole climax reaches, whereas we don't really know, I think as Deborah mentioned in her email, it's a morality issue,

we don't really know the origin of the sources. So Mongolia tries to repatriate fossils, and it's kind of like a whole international law intrigue. It's almost like an adventure, like, you know, mystery. It's just so fascinating. It touches in so many different subjects that they're really relevant right now. And I thought it was just great writing and just so engrossing overall. Wow, that's great.

She's a gorgeous writer. It's one of those books that is science subversive, which I always like those, where the adventure and the sort of, the mystery of the story pull you forward and woven through it as science. Let me give a preview of coming attractions, which is also one of my favorite books. I'm reading it now because we're having

the author on in a few weeks. It's called American Eden by Victoria Johnson. And it talks about David Hossack who was famous as being the doctor at the Burr Hamilton shootout. And that's all that people knew

about him. But he started the first arboreoreore him here in New York, which is buried now under Rockefeller Center. It's an incredible history of him, first as a doctor and then as a botanist. And I thought I knew about American history. It's one of my hobbies, especially in the New York City area. I knew nothing about this guy. It's absolutely riveting reading about who this guy was.

Adding it to my list, too. No, I'm. Victoria. She'll be on in a few weeks. So I want to thank all of you for taking time to be with us today. Stephanie Sandala is associate editor at Library General Reviews here in New York. Deborah Blum, director of the Knight Science Journalism Program in MIT, and author of the Poison Squad. Thank you, I really.

Breaking records everywhere. Dr. Eric Topol, a cardiologist, executive president, and professor at Scripps Research in La Jolla. And Eric, we're going to have you back to talk about your gadgets, okay? Sure. I saw your body scan that you did, and that was absolutely amazing. I need to listen to that one. With my smartphone. Yes, you did it with your smartphone.

And you've picked up your kidney stones. We've got to talk about that, okay? So you'll have to come back. That'd be fun, sure. And we have a full list of all our panelists recommendations on some of mine at Science Friday.com slash best books. Thank you, Walt, for taking time with you with us today. Happy holiday.

Thank you, Ira. B.J. Leiterman composed our theme music, and a special thanks to our digital producer, Johanna Meyer, for helping us compile our best books list and gathering all those voice messages and memos. Thank you, Johanna. We've run out of time on this Pearl Harbor anniversary day. So I want to wish everybody a great weekend. We'll see you next week.

I'm Ira Flato in New York.