As we discussed last week, The Dance of Life by Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz and Roger Highfield is a story of developmental biology research. It is also a story of motherhood, including the specific joys and anxieties of prenatal motherhood. Meanwhile, my church has chosen Luke 1-2 for its Advent texts, and Luke’s Gospel pays more attention to the prenatal experience of Mary and her cousin Elizabeth than the other accounts. I don’t want to over-theologize Zernicka-Goetz and Highfield’s book and I don’t think it is any sort of parable or modern day nativity. But reading it alongside the early chapters of Luke makes it hard to ignore the rhymes arising from features common to human experience.
[Read more…] about Science Corner: The Dance of Life and Advent Pt 2
science book club
Science Corner: The Dance of Life and Advent Pt 1
I haven’t discussed many books this year, but I’m currently reading The Dance of Life by Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz and Roger Highfield and I was struck by the relevance to advent. Zernicka-Goetz is a developmental biologist, which means she studies the processes by which a fertilized zygote transforms from a single cell to an entire organism like a mouse or a human. The book, cowritten with journalist Roger Highfield, is both a memoir of Zernicka-Goetz’ career and an introduction to her research and its context in the wider science of human development, including the medical implications. I had never really thought about Jesus going through this development process, so I thought perhaps we could explore that topic together as an avenue through the book.
[Read more…] about Science Corner: The Dance of Life and Advent Pt 1
Science Book Review: Unthinkable – An Extraordinary Journey through the World’s Strangest Brains
Helen Thomson closes Unthinkable by describing it as “romantic science,” an approach that emphasizes human connection alongside data and clinical reports. The humans in question are not the practitioners of science but the subjects of its investigations. Thomson profiles nine people from all over the world whose subjective experiences of that world push the limits of our ability to communicate about them. She feels compelled to employ rich, high bandwidth personal accounts because an abstraction like “lycanthropy” needs to be grounded somewhere to be comprehensible.
[Read more…] about Science Book Review: Unthinkable – An Extraordinary Journey through the World’s Strangest Brains
Science Book Review: Vessel
I finished Vessel by Lisa Nichols in just under 48 hours, partly because it is concise and briskly paced, and partly because the plot was that engaging. I’ll do my best not to give away the twists and turns of the plot, as their discovery is one of the book’s pleasures. The setup is that astronaut Catherine Wells has returned to Earth after a nine year absence, the sole survivor of a interstellar mission written off as a complete loss years earlier. She has no recollection of the critical portions of her journey, and thus cannot explain where her crewmates are, why she was gone for so long, and how she got back. Naturally, more is revealed over the course of the book, and while I enjoyed the steady pulling back of the curtain on the cosmic mystery, some of the very human observations stood out to me the most.
[Read more…] about Science Book Review: Vessel
Science Book Review: Slime – How Algae Created Us, Plague Us, and Just Might Save Us
Since I’m at the beach this week, it seems like a good time to leave you with a review of Ruth Kassinger’s Slime, a broad survey of all the ways scientists and entrepreneurs are solving problems with algae. Algae have the potential to help us feed more people and provide better nutrition, to fuel transportation at personal and industrial scales, and to help clean up some of the environmental messes we’ve made. More than once while reading the book you may sense that algae sound too good to be true. Kassinger is clearly enthusiastic; at the same time, she is frank about the commercial struggles and failures algae businesses have already faced. Most of the projects she describes are in proof-of-concept or prototype stages and have significant hurdles to overcome if they are to scale to the point of global impact. Still, the opening chapters remind us that algae have already shaped the world several times over, so their potential is not entirely theoretical.
[Read more…] about Science Book Review: Slime – How Algae Created Us, Plague Us, and Just Might Save Us