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New and Noteworthy
THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE WRITING 2003
Edited by Oliver Sacks
Ecco Books
288 pages, $14
THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE AND NATURE WRITING 2003
Edited by Richard Dawkins
Houghton Mifflin
352 pages, $27.50
If you didn�t manage to make it through every issue of the New York Times, Harper�s Magazine, and the Atlantic Monthly, not to mention the smaller scientific journals like Dædalus and the various alternative weeklies this year, consider these anthologies your cheat sheets. Both offer some of the most insightful stories from the brightest science journalists working today.
WHAT PRICE BETTER HEALTH?
Hazards of the Research Imperative
By Daniel Callahan
University of California Press
335 pages, $30
A senior fellow at Harvard Medical School takes a provocative stand against research for research�s sake, exploring the National Institutes of Health�s annual budget, the high prices charged by drug companies, and the inflated estimates of money saved on health care thanks to research. Excessive scientific zeal is not always a good thing and medical research must be understood in light of public policy needs, he argues, pointing to the use and misuse of human subjects for clinical trials, and the controversies surrounding stem cell research.
THE DOCTORS� PLAGUE
Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweiss
By Sherwin Nuland
W.W. Norton & Company
160 pages, $22
In this short volume, best-selling author and Acumen contributor Sherwin Nuland tells the fascinating tale of Ignac Semmelweiss, remembered for being the first, in mid-19th century Vienna, to connect “dirt” with disease, after he noticed that new mothers at the hospital where he worked were dying of fever at an alarming rate. Semmelweiss deduced that physicians themselves were unknowingly transmitting sickness through unhygienic procedures. But his challenge of the medical establishment ultimately undid the doctor himself.
THE DISCOVERY OF GLOBAL WARMING
By Spencer Weart
Harvard University Press
224 pages, $25
In 2001, a panel of world scientists issued a definitive report announcing that the world was warming at an unprecedented rate, and that the heat up was due to greenhouse gases generated by human activity. Although environmentalists had long before shaped their opinions on the greenhouse effect, the scientific consensus was more than a century in the making. Physicist Spencer Weart portrays researchers working on discrete bits of a topic so complex that they could never achieve full certainty alone.
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