Twenty for 2020. Popular science books you don't want to miss
Also vaccine safety, acceptance, and game theory.
Hello! How have you been? I’d like to heartily welcome everyone who has recently started receiving my newsletter.
Before I get to the main topic of memorable science books, I want to cover vaccines.
Vaccine safety.
First of all, vaccines. I’ve covered vaccine safety in quite a bit of detail in previous newsletters like this one on COVID-19 vaccine myths. This week the second part of a podcast I recorded with Shrikant Joshi dropped online. You can listen to it here.
The Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine was approved in the United Kingdom a few days ago, and approved for emergency use in the United States late last night. The second person in the UK to receive the vaccine was someone named William Shakespeare. Naturally, this was the subject of many jokes on the internet for around 48 hours. Then, reports surfaced that a couple of people who had received the vaccine had suffered from allergic reactions. The UK National Health Service asked those with history of significant allergic reactions to abstain from receiving the vaccine.
Safety and effectiveness in the real world when there are millions of people who receive a drug or vaccine may deviate from safety and efficacy in clinical trials. This is not unusual, but signals the need to track safety over time.
It’s crucial to keep in mind that whether we are taking about vaccines or treatments or simply walking in a city, there is no such thing as absolutely safe. Safety is a term that has to weigh benefit against danger from the disease and risks.
Moderna’s mRNA vaccine is up for review on December 17. The FDA reiterated during their life broadcast that safety would continue to be monitored. The UAE has approved a vaccine by Sinopharm developed in China which was 86% efficacious in clinical trials.
Vaccines and game theory.
How likely are people to take a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine? A story in the Wall Street Journal indicates that compared to many other countries people in India might be more more likely to get vaccinated.
One way to promote uptake is for prominent individuals to get vaccinated first. But as more people get vaccinated, it becomes harder to eradicate a disease.
This brings me to a classic paper on vaccination and game theory. For a vaccine-preventable disease, a study has shown that people are less likely to take a vaccine if the risk of disease is low because other people are vaccinated. In the authors’ words—
If a sufficient proportion of the population is already immune, either naturally or by vaccination, then even the slightest risk associated with vaccination will outweigh the risk from infection. As a result, individual self-interest might preclude complete eradication of a vaccine-preventable disease… After a vaccine scare, even if perceived vaccine risk is greatly reduced, it will be relatively difficult to restore prescare vaccine coverage levels.
Now, on to the main topic for this week.
Best science books of the year
I’m on track to read roughly 120 books this year— the most I’ve read in a single year in my life. I’ve got a few more to go. I just ordered David Deamer’s Origin of Life: What Everyone Needs to Know and I’m waiting for the release of Krish Ashok’s Masala Lab in a few days.
Thanks to being stuck at home during the pandemic, I have shifted a sizable chunk of my salary to Amazon’s top-line. Without the need to travel, I’ve had more time to read. Reading two books a week has not been very difficult.
I was upset that mainstream media outlets had mostly ignored popular science books in their yearly best-of lists (Really? That too in a plague year?). Some media outlets had even created lists early in the year, omitting all books published in November and December. I put together an eclectic personal list of the popular science books I enjoyed reading the most this year.
Philip Moscovitch mentioned my list in a round-up for Halifax Examiner that you can read here.
Here’s my list (and though it is numbered to twenty, there are more than twenty books):
Jim Al-Khalili’s The World According to Physics is a strong contender for popular science book of the year. This book is grand in design, clear in language, and engaging in voice. Most pleasing of all is the tone of wonder and humility throughout the book.
Smellosophy by A.S. Barwich about the least understood and appreciated sense, and how nearly everything we know about it has been learned in the past few decades is a book that everyone should read. Also, the book recognizes to Linda Buck, a scientific hero of mine.
On to dinosaurs. Every time someone says "when the dinosaurs went extinct" I cringe, because it's simply not true. Dinosaurs had feathers. We can predict their colors. And some are still alive. None of this was known when I was a child. The Story of Dinosaurs in 25 Discoveries by Donald Prothero and Dinosaurs Rediscovered by Michael Benton are where you should start. If your curiosity is still not sated, I recommend The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World by Stephen Brusatte.
I really enjoyed reading Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World by Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West. Bergstrom has been tirelessly combatting misinformation, bad experimental design, and junk science during the pandemic. In this book, he lays bare many of the tools of the trade.
Vaclav Smil’s Growth is not for everyone. In fact, it’s probably not for anyone. But Smil’s sweep of knowledge, ability to synthesize facts from multiple fields, and capacity for predictive, audacious thinking in breathtaking. This is not a book you breeze through. Every sentence is probably someone’s PhD thesis or postdoctoral work. But I don’t know anyone else who can pull off a book with climate change, pandemics, AI, and complex systems in one book.
There are many books on space, so do we need a history of spaceflight? Yes! Especially if it is a Spaceflight: A Concise History- a breezy book written by the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s senior curator Michael Neufeld. This accessible book puts the space race into proper perspective.
Pick up The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World by Christopher Preston. It is an excellent book about de-extinction of species, and engineering the environment. One day we may actually be terraforming Mars.
I highly recommend Editing Humanity by Kevin Davies on the science, short history, and prospects of CRISPR- the technology that won its discoverers the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year. Davies has a unique way of recounting the intrigue behind this discovery.
When Life Nearly Died is a cautionary tale about the end Permian mass extinction event by my favorite paleobiologist, Michael J. Benton.
At a moment when trust in science is abysmally low and antiscience is rampant, Why Trust Science? By Naomi Oreskes and The Scientific Attitude by Lee McIntyre (whose earlier book Post-Truth became an instant classic) are essential reading.
Back when everyone was focusing solely on the R0, researchers demonstrated that we have to think beyond that number and remember that 20% of people are responsible for around 80% of spread of SARS-CoV-2. One of the researchers who spearheaded teams that work on how diseases spread is Adam Kucharski and his book The Rules of Contagion is a must-read this year.
Moving on to astronomy and astrophysics I’d like to recommend two books- one on the first few seconds of the universe (Dan Hooper’s At the Edge of Time) and the other on how the universe ends (The End of Everything: Astrophysically Speaking by Katie Mack). Read both of them.
Siddharth Singh’s book The Great Smog of India caught my attention earlier this year. It spells out just how bad things are in one of the most polluted nations in the world and what needs to be done.
Richard Cytowic’s Synesthesia is literally and figuratively a mind-expanding book. Take for example this direct quote from the book— “From a physiological viewpoint there is nothing unique about the signals that constitute vision, an itch, or an odor. Nerve impulses from the retina and cochlea are no different than those that come from the big toe.”
A lot of things keep me up at night. That includes anthropogenic climate change. What We Know About Climate Change by Kerry Emanuel is an excellent book under 100 pages that explains what is going on in simple language.
There were always people who believed in dangerous and stupid ideas. The difference now is they can congregate on the internet. Donald Prothero talks about this weird new world in Weird Earth: Debunking Strange Ideas About Our Planet.
Mike Berners-Lee’s There is No Planet B grabs you with the title and then provides bite-sized solutions to the global climate crisis.
Can I pick an older one from the interface of psychology and the dismal science that I read in 2020? If you liked Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow and Thaler and Suntein's Nudge you will enjoy Scarcity by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir. This book explains how scarcity (whether it is of time, money, or other finite resources) constrains our thinking.
How about a book for children that grown-ups can also enjoy? Amazing Evolution: The Journey of Life is factually accurate, fun, easy to read, and pretty. It is suitable for children from the age of seven or eight all the way to grown-ups.
While on the topic of books for children, I want to mention the Science Comics series, which is gorgeous and engaging. They’re appropriate for children, but adults will enjoy reading and learning from them too. I have read the ones on space, wild weather, and plagues and they have just the right mix of humor, imagination, and information to draw and hold attention.
Please let me know in the comments if I’ve missed any popular science books that you particularly enjoyed this year.
The link for the hardcover “COVID-19: Separating Fact from Fiction” is now available on Amazon’s Indian site. Here’s the link to the Kindle version on Amazon.com.
Here’s an excerpt of the book in which I talk about how so many COVID-19 vaccines were developed so quickly (and why they’re not the same).
If you enjoy the book, please do leave me a review on Amazon or on Goodreads.
Finally, in other news, I was asked by The STEM Times to write a short post about how I stumbled into scientific publishing. You can read that post below—
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