Introductory
ejohnson | June 21, 2010
Before writing Inside the Outbreaks: The Elite Medical Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, Atlanta native Mark Pendergrast authored a history of another of the city's cornerstone institutions, the Coca-Cola company, in addition to a history of coffee and two other books.
Pendergrast graduated from Harvard with a degree in English literature before receiving his Masters degree in library science from Simmons College. In 1991 he began writing full-time, and his articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Financial Analyst, among other…
oracknows | October 1, 2008Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste...
Well, not really. I might have one of the two. Or not.
Be that as it may, I'm Orac, and I blog regularly at Respectful Insolence. In the more than two and a half years I've been with ScienceBlogs (not to mention the more than a year before that on my own), I've become known as its resident "vaccine blogger." True, others around here sometimes do posts about vaccines, antivaccine lunacy, and the discredited idea that vaccines somehow cause autism, but with nowhere near the frequency and intensity that I do. Without a doubt,…
pauloffit | September 30, 2008My name is Paul Offit. I'm the chief of the division of infectious diseases at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and my published expertise is in the area of vaccine safety and rotavirus-specific immune responses. (I'm the co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine, RotaTeq). I've written a book about the vaccine-autism controversy titled AUTISM'S FALSE PROPHETS: BAD SCIENCE, RISKY MEDICINE, AND THE SEARCH FOR A CURE. First: a little background on autism and the birth of the controversy.
There is no known cause or cure for autism. But in the late 1990s two hypotheses garnered a great deal of…
ksharpe | September 30, 2008Hello. Thanks for stopping by the ScienceBlogs Book Club. It's my pleasure to introduce our next title, and the panelists who will be discussing it with you.
Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure, by Dr. Paul Offit, describes how the belief that vaccines might cause autism arose and gained popularity during the early years of this decade. The book discusses the scientists, politicians, and parent groups that helped fuel the fears that vaccines, or a mercury-containing preservative in them, accounted for a sharp rise in autism cases worldwide, and the…
jdennehy | June 1, 2008Escherichia coli is a superstar of the microbe world. Like Zelig, E. coli has been on the scene of some of the most important discoveries of biology. For example, Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod deciphered gene regulation using E. coli's Lac Operon. Roger Kornberg discovered DNA polymerase using E. coli. Even E. coli's parasites (phages) are better known than the vast majority of living things. The story of E. coli is an amazing one, so it is puzzling that E. coli does not have its own biography.
That is, until now: Microcosm.
And I couldn't think of a better biographer than science writer…
sb admin | June 1, 2008To kick off this book club discussion, I want to explain how I ended up the past couple years obsessing over E. coli. If you don't know much about E. coli, it may sound like a strange thing to do. But the time I spent in this microbe's intellectual company was deeply enlightening.
I came to write Microcosm after having worked on several articles and blog posts that swarmed around the same fundamental question: What does it mean to be alive? This is obviously a very old puzzle, but today scientists are attacking it with a fresh passion.
Astrobiologists hoping to find life on other planets, for…
loom | June 1, 2008To kick off this book club discussion, I want to explain how I ended up the past couple years obsessing over E. coli. If you don't know much about E. coli, it may sound like a strange thing to do. But the time I spent in this microbe's intellectual company was deeply enlightening.
I came to write Microcosm after having worked on several articles and blog posts that swarmed around the same fundamental question: What does it mean to be alive? This is obviously a very old puzzle, but today scientists are attacking it with a fresh passion.
Astrobiologists hoping to find life on other planets, for…
ksharpe | June 1, 2008Hello, and welcome to the ScienceBlogs Book Club. This is a ScienceBlogs special feature: an online, round-table discussion of Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life, by Carl Zimmer. Carl will be joined on the blog by three expert guests—Jessica Snyder Sachs, John Dennehy, and PZ Myers.
Microcosm reveals how a common bacterium, most often associated in this country with outbreaks of foodborne illness, has been a scientific workhorse for decades, quietly starring in some of the last century's most spectacular achievements in biology: the discovery of genes, the understanding of…