The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013

I am not one who has a scientific bent, but I am fascinated by science. I just can never get too deeply into it, because I don't understand high concepts of math, and because I don't have the patience for the scientific method. But I did enjoy many of the essays in the latest volume of The Best American Science and Nature Writing.

The volume was edited by Siddhartha Mukherjee, who wrote the excellent The Emperor of All Maladies. He notes in his introduction that science is under attack: "The failure to acknowledge or understand the discoveries of science was not unique to Galileo's time. We have our own Sizzis and Delle Colombes today: politicians who deny the existence of global warming, even as glaciers shrink in Greenland and ice disappears from the Arctic...and advocates of creationism, who would see pseudoscience taught in the nation's schools, 164 years after the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species."

There are all sorts of dire warnings in the this book. In Sylvia A. Earle's "The Sweet Spot in Time," she writes, "a full 90 percent of all large wild fish (and many small kinds as well) have disappeared from the world's oceans, the result of devastating industrial fishing." Earle is a pioneer among aquanauts (the first woman to have that profession). But she's also hopeful: "Fifty years into the future, it will be too late to do what is possible right now...Never again will there be a better time to take actions that can ensure an enduring place for ourselves within the living systems that sustain us."

For nightmare fodder, there are two articles on deadly diseases. Michael Specter, in "The Deadliest Virus," acquaints us with H5N1 (the "bird flu"): "it has since killed 346 of the 587 people it is known to have infected--nearly 60 percent...the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, which killed at least 50 million people, had a mortality rate of between 2 and 3 percent. Influenza normally kills far fewer than one-tenth of 1 percent of those infected. This makes H5N1 one of the deadliest microbes known to medical science."

David Quammen, in "Out of the Wild," writes about zoonoses--"animal infections that spill into people. About 60 percent of human infectious diseases are zoonoses." I read both of these articles in one sitting, which made me not want to leave the house.

I preferred the articles that were about nature. One about quantum mechanics was way over my head, and there was another about math that I can't even summarize. I liked Rick Bass's essay on his favorite tree, "The Larch;" Tim Zimmerman's "Talk to Me," about attempts to communicate with animals; Brett Forrest's "Shattered Genius," about his hunting down the reclusive mathematics genius, Grigori Yakolevich Perelman; Oliver Sacks' memoir of his experience with drugs, "Altered States;" and Keith Gessen's "Polar Express," an account of a trip on a Russian cargo ship through the Arctic Ocean.

Additionally, there were several nuggets of information worth sharing. David Owen, in his article "The Artificial Leaf," points out that many scientists are Grateful Dead fans: "The hypothesis was that a love for the Dead reflects an iconoclastic outlook that's conducive to innovative thinking, and that Deadheads share what Nocera now thinks of as a Garcian conception of open-source collaboration."

In astronomy, we learn from Alan Lightman, in "Our Place in the Universe," that "The prize for exploring the greatest distance in space goes to a man named Garth Illingworth, who works in a ten-by-fifteen-foot office at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Illingworth studies galaxies so distant that their light has traveled through space for more than 13 billion years to get here." Elizabeth Kolbert, in "Recall of the Wild," introduces us to the auroch: "There are more than 1.5 billion cows in the world today, and all of them are believed to be descended from the aurochs--Bos primigenius--which once ranged across Europe, much of Asia, and parts of the Middle East...Julius Caesar described them as being just 'a little below the elephant in size.'"

In "The Wisdom of Psychopaths," Kevin Dutton makes the perhaps obvious but important statement that "Traits that are common among psychopathic serial killers--a grandiose sense of self-worth, persuasiveness, superficial charm, ruthlessness, lack of remorse, and manipulation of others--are also shared by politicians and world leaders."

My favorite article was Nathaniel Rich's "Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality?" He starts with the fascinating fact that a type of jellyfish, Turritopsis dohrnii, may be immortal. It is sometimes called the Benjamin Button jellyfish, because when it reaches the end of its life cycle, it reverts back to its earliest form of development, and starts all over again. That's enough to be interesting, but then he introduces us to Shin Kobuta, a marine biologist who specializes in hydrozoans, which include jellyfish. He's quite a character, something of a celebrity in Japan (he writes a jellyfish column for a newspaper), and a karaoke addict. He has even written songs about jellyfish, which can be found in the international database of karaoke machines.

All in all, this was an excellent collection, and that I was able to understand as much as I could is a testament to the lucid writing of the authors assembled.