Best American Science and Nature Writing

 2021...2023...

Jennifer Doudna on gene-editing

The biochemist Jennifer Doudna—who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, in 2020—reveals a few books that she thinks best equip one to understand the promise and potential peril of the gene-editing revolution.

https://www.threads.net/@newyorkermag/post/DBM4Oo3hAiz?xmt=AQGzR8uWJUxEKH34B6UaClaVdllgDJY1CdCOjOFZ8mbw9Q

A teaching hospital

110425_a15729_g2048 JPEG Image · 340 KB

I’m a Doctor. ChatGPT’s Bedside Manner Is Better Than Mine.

As a young, idealistic medical student in the 2000s, I thought my future job as a doctor would always be safe from artificial intelligence.

At the time it was already clear that machines would eventually outperform humans at the technical side of medicine. Whenever I searched Google with a list of symptoms from a rare disease, for example, the same abstruse answer that I was struggling to memorize for exams reliably appeared within the first few results.

But I was certain that the other side of practicing medicine, the human side, would keep my job safe. This side requires compassion, empathy and clear communication between doctor and patient. As long as patients were still composed of flesh and blood, I figured, their doctors would need to be, too. The one thing I would always have over A.I. was my bedside manner.

When ChatGPT and other large language models appeared, however, I saw my job security go out the window...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/05/opinion/ai-chatgpt-medicine-doctor.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Medical Gaslighting

By Ilana Jacqueline
Narrated by Lori Prince

Listen on Audible:
https://www.audible.com/pd/B0DFMX44S4?source_code=ASSORAP0511160006&share_location=pdp

How the World Eats

 @julianbaggini: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DAiKccAovql/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=M2M0Y2JmOTAyOA==

Anti-Aging Enthusiasts Are Taking a Pill to Extend Their Lives. Will It Work?

…

"Let's see, taking something that's risky, that's going to have no benefits?" Dr. Dillin said. "I'll pass."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/24/well/live/rapamycin-aging-longevity-benefits-risks.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Climate & health

The climate crisis is a health crisis.

The most effective action to slow and reverse ClimateChange is transitioning to renewable energy and moving away from fossil fuels.

Learn more 🔗bit.ly/3TFVSXs #UNGA79

Something’s Poisoning America’s Land. Farmers Fear ‘Forever’ Chemicals.

For decades, farmers across America have been encouraged by the federal government to spread municipal sewage on millions of acres of farmland as fertilizer. It was rich in nutrients, and it helped keep the sludge out of landfills.

But a growing body of research shows that this black sludge, made from the sewage that flows from homes and factories, can contain heavy concentrations of chemicals thought to increase the risk of certain types of cancer and to cause birth defects and developmental delays in children.

Known as "forever chemicals" because of their longevity, these toxic contaminants are now being detected, sometimes at high levels, on farmland across the country, including in Texas, Maine, Michigan, New York and Tennessee. In some cases the chemicals are suspected of sickening or killing livestock and are turning up in produce. Farmers are beginning to fear for their own health.

The national scale of farmland contamination by these chemicals — which are used in everything from microwave popcorn bags and firefighting gear to nonstick pans and stain-resistant carpets — is only now starting to become apparent. There are now lawsuits against providers of the fertilizer, as well as against the Environmental Protection Agency, alleging that the agency failed to regulate the chemicals, known as PFAS…

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/31/climate/pfas-fertilizer-sludge-farm.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

No, Lyme disease is not an escaped military bioweapon, despite what conspiracy theorists say - The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/no-lyme-diease-is-not-an-escaped-military-bioweapon-despite-what-conspiracy-theorists-say/2019/08/09/5bbd85fa-afe4-11e9-8e77-03b30bc29f64_story.html

No, Lyme disease is not an escaped military bioweapon, despite what conspiracy theorists say theconversation.com

Reasonable expectations (for a centenarian)

Maria Branyas Morera, World's Oldest Person, Dies at 117

Ms. Morera, who cultivated a following on social media as "Super Catalan Grandma," died peacefully in her sleep, her family said.

...Like many supercentenarians, Ms. Morera became the subject of scientific fascination. Her habits and lifestyle — and genetic makeup — have been studied in the hopes of understanding her longevity.

"What do you expect from life?" a doctor once asked her while retrieving blood samples for study, according to El País.

Ms. Morera, unmoved, answered simply: "Death."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/20/world/europe/worlds-oldest-person-maria-branyas-dead.html?smid=em-share

We’re Applying Lessons From Covid to Bird Flu. That’s Not Good.

…Undeniably, the country is in a different place regarding the risks from Covid than it was two or three or four years ago, and it is perfectly justifiable that many Americans are less interested in hearing about Covid than they were then. Perhaps it is also natural to not want to hear about public health matters at all — the previous years were difficult and painful, after all. But to believe that means we should pass laws discouraging individuals from taking precautions, or to choose not to pursue surveillance measures to actually track the progress of a new disease threat, is a deeply pathological response to an experience of pandemic trauma, and one that implies it is more problematic to remind those around us of ongoing health risks than to take action to limit them. We seem to have memory-holed not just the suffering of Covid-19 but also the initial burst of inspiring if imperfect solidarity it produced, preferring instead to embrace the "bipartisan" indifference our pandemic tribalism ultimately yielded to. Thankfully, bird flu isn't making us pay for it — yet.

David Wallace-Wells

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/07/opinion/bird-flu-covid.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

A Prescription for Physicians: Listen to the Patient’s Story

In "Telltale Hearts," a new memoir, Dr. Dean-David Schillinger traces the links between narrative and well-being.

...One of the chief complaints about physicians these days is that they don't have enough time and they don't really listen. So Dr. Schillinger, a primary care physician at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, has written a book about the importance of patients' stories. He writes of the power of narrative to build trust that cuts through the barriers that often separate doctors and patients to ultimately improve care.

"What has increasingly been lost as we advance in our technologies, using electronic health records that make us look at the computer and not at the patient, and becoming more constrained from a time perspective, is the most important and common medical procedure — the medical interview," Dr. Schillinger said told The New York Times.

"A lot of people think that's the doctor peppering the patient with questions, but that's not really how it should go," he added. "It really should be about eliciting the patient's perspective on the experience and their social context."

Science is paramount, he said, but the patient's story is an essential complement. "It's when we separate the two that we get in trouble," Dr. Schillinger said. The book is about what he thinks of as "the alchemy of science and story."
...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/03/health/schillinger-telltale-heart.html?smid=em-share

Into the Heart of Life: Richard Powers on Living with Bewilderment at the Otherworldly Wonder of Our World – The Marginalian

Maria Popova again has me thinking this (like its predecessor "Overstory") would be a good text for Environmental Ethics. Bioethics too.

"…Set sometime in the near future, when our search for life beyond the Solar System has come to its inevitable fruition, [Bewilderment] tells the story of a thirty-nine-year-old astrobiologist and his neurodivergent, frightened, boundlessly courageous nine-year-old son, searching together for other worlds and instead discovering how to reworld ours with meaning. 

Radiating from their quest is a luminous invitation to live up to our nature not as creatures consumed by "the black hole of the self," as Powers so perfectly puts it in his talk, but as living empathy machines and portable cosmoses of possibility, whose planetary story is yet unwritten…

As the father searches for other worlds, he is savaged by despair at humanity's catastrophic mismanagement of this one, haunted by the growing sense that we couldn't possibly be good interplanetary emissaries until we have become good stewards of our own home planet. But each time he hits rock bottom, he bounces back up — as we all do, as we all must in order to go on living — with rekindled faith in what we are capable of…"

https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/06/26/richard-powers-bewilderment/

Unethical?

Would You Clone Your Dog?
by Alexandra Horowitz

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/07/01/would-you-clone-your-dog

Atul Gawande on finding meaning in mortality

On Mortality and Meaning by The On Being Project

The eighth episode in our Wisdom Season

Read on Substack

Not enough rocks?

Google Is Using A.I. to Answer Your Health Questions. Should You Trust It?

…The system has already been shown to produce bad answers seemingly based on flawed sources. When asked "how many rocks should I eat," for example, A.I. Overviews told some users to eat at least one rock a day for vitamins and minerals. (The advice was scraped from The Onion, a satirical site.)
…
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/well/live/google-ai-health-information.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

On Call

Dr. Fauci's book describes trying to build a government response to Covid "with a president who literally did not understand what was going on in some very fundamental ways." Some examples.

https://www.threads.net/@maddowshow/post/C8Vze4FxImX/?xmt=AQGzVW1N-Bsp_vcCfymOvAqz2JlOJTYcYaRg4A_A1uxxPw

Pandemic lit

The growing body of literature about the pandemic "radiates a desire to be useful, somehow, and a sense that perhaps fiction can give people a new way of thinking about the crisis," Katy Waldman writes.

https://www.threads.net/@newyorkermag/post/C8C7MYhR8on/?xmt=AQGzamCu9Yn97gHusiSyOs4fF_OnIRCe-j37P9X2mAlv6A

How Do We Know What Animals Are Really Feeling?

Animal-welfare science tries to get inside the minds of a huge range of species — in order to help improve their lives.

"...a true ethical question, one that troubled the entire premise of a multibillion-dollar global industry: "whether or not it is ethical to keep these hens for the sole purpose of egg-laying, only to have them slaughtered at the end." Among the scores of students we watched over the course of a weekend, LeBlond and her teammates from the Atlantic Veterinary College were the only ones who, in the final seconds of their talks, raised deep questions about the scenario's entire premise — about whether, in the end, these fictional animals should have been put in these fictional situations in the first place.

It was a question that the judges of the Animal Welfare Assessment Contest had no doubt considered, but it also was one that seemed to lie outside the contest's purview: In its either-or structure, the contest is helping train future professionals how to improve, rather than remove, the ties that bind animals into human society. Unless the day arrives when there is no need for laboratory rats, or poultry barns, or facilities to house desert tortoises and other captive wildlife, the animals of North America will be in the hands of veterinarians and animal scientists like LeBlond and her classmates, to help shape their situations the very best way they can." nyt