Brief recap of my 2021 reading list
I had a goal to read just one book a month for leisure, totaling 12 over the course of the year. A noble goal, and one that might have been achievable in any normal year, but 2021 was…a weird year, to say the least.
Although I fell short of my goal, I did manage to finish eight. Below are some of the high points and recommendations if you want to follow in my literary footsteps.
Book I was saddest to finish: Island of the Colorblind, Oliver Sacks
The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat made Oliver Sacks my absolute favorite science writer. His clinical descriptions of rare neurological case studies were compelling, and I have yet to find another author who can tell a science story as well as he can.
After going through many of his other books in previous years (Anthropologist on Mars, Awakenings, and Musicophilia are some of my other favorites), 2021 gave me the chance to read Island of the Colorblind.
Part clinical research notebook and part travel memoir, Island describes Sacks’ visits to the islands of Pingelap in Micronesia. These islands popped up on Sacks’ radar due to the unusually high prevalence of achromatopsia, or colorblindness, among the residents.
The word “colorblind” is often misused. When a patient has difficulty differentiating between red and green, for example, this is technically called a color vision deficiency. Color vision deficiency is relatively common, happening in about 1 in 200 women and 1 in 10 men (the genes associated with the condition are sex-linked, which explains the difference between sexes.) If a person fails to see the number in the image below, they might be diagnosed with color vision deficiency.
https://www.webeyeclinic.com/color-blind/ishihara-test
But achromatopsia is wildly different from color vision deficiency. Achromatopes have atypically functioning cone photoreceptors, the neurons of the retina that process color vision. Because of this deficit, they see absolutely no color - everything is black, white, or some shade of gray in between.
Even more problematic is their poor acuity, where their visual world is very blurry. Since nearly all of the color sensing cells are found in the fovea, which captures information from the center of our visual field with our best visual acuity, their vision is often blurry.
Generally, achromatopsia is rare in the US, occurring in about 1 in 100,000 births. On Pingelap atoll, however, that rate is as high as 5% of the population. The reason behind this discrepancy was never resolved, however some suggest that high rates of consanguineous marriages among those who survived a deadly typhoon may explain the phenomenon.
Unfortunately, finishing this book meant one less fewer Oliver Sacks book for me to get lost in.
Author I envy the least: Justin Schmidt, The Sting of the Wild
For much of my childhood, I was convinced I wanted to be an entomologist. I don’t exactly know why this field of study piqued my interest. Maybe because everyone else thought bugs were gross? Or maybe because it was the longest word I knew that not everyone knew? Either way, my 7-year-old self was very vocal about my long term career goals.
It took several decades for me to actually read a book written by an entomologist, and I have never been happier that my childhood plans fell through by fifth grade graduation.
Dr. Schmidt is one of the realest of the real entomologists out there. Of course, his academic work on honeybee physiology, covering the range of topics from diet to social behaviors, is interesting and critically important for this keystone species.
But his real claim to fame is the creation of the Schmidt Pain Index, a numerical system for evaluating the severity of the stings of various ants, bees, scorpions, wasps, and other things people generally avoid.
His research methodology is straightforward: get stung. Get stung more than a thousand times by different venomous creepy crawlies. For science.
My favorite section is his flowery descriptions of the sensations after being stung. At a 1 on the pain index is the sting of the Red Fire Ant (Solenopsis invicta) - “walking across a shag carpet and reaching for the light switch.” Having experienced this mild pain before, Schmidt is pretty spot on. (My childhood friend, having sat on a hive of fire ants at baseball camp, probably has a more vivid recollection of the pain.)
On the other end of the spectrum, scoring a 4+, which is the highest his pain index goes, is the sting of the Bullet Ant (Paraponera clavata), an ant from the Central American rainforest. According to Schmidt, being stung by one of these aptly-named insects feels “like walking over flaming charcoal with a three-inch rusty nail in your heel”. In previous classes, I have used a discussion about the molecular action of the poneratoxin as a vehicle to explain the importance of voltage-gated sodium channels. 1
He is THE sommelier of venoms, and you gotta respect his wanton lack of concern for his own well being.
https://answersafrica.com/bullet-ant-sting-facts.html
Let’s just say there’s no sum of money or science glory that could push me to work in the field of prion diseases.
Prions are misfolded proteins that can cause diseases. When they were first proposed in 1982 by Stanley Prusiner, he was met with resistance from the science community. Every disease identified up until this point was strictly living: parasites, bacteria, or viruses (although whether or not these are living is up for debate). The idea that a nonliving thing can cause disease was heretical. Nevertheless, the evidence for these proteinaceous infectious particles was solid, and Prusiner eventually won a Nobel Prize in 1997.
Nearly indestructible, prions can withstand conditions that would destroy most other biological pathogens. They can survive temperatures as high as 800 degrees Celsius, sometimes denaturing, then refolding once the temperature cools back down. Chemicals like formaldehyde are very effective at destroying bacteria, but it seems to actually strengthen prions.
Of clinical importance, prions cause very strange diseases, many of which are described by Max in The Family Who Couldn’t Sleep. Scrapie, which affects livestock and wild animals like sheep and goats, causes them to rub up against trees and rocks until they have open sores all over their bodies. Kuru is a human disease that causes uncontrollable shaking and wild laughter. And most famous of all is Mad Cow Disease and the parallel human disease Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, causing dementia, psychosis, and involuntary movements.
Oh, I forgot to mention - all of these prion diseases are fatal, sometimes killing within a year of symptoms presentation.
The majority of the investigative work was done on a prion disease called Fatal Familial Insomnia, the title’s name sake. Max describes a cursed family line in Italy, where the patients experience progressively worsening insomnia over the course of months, eventually leading to absolute sleeplessness for consecutive days until they eventually die from multiple organ system failure.
If an Omicron Christmas can’t scare you, prions can.
Best peek into a neuroscientist’s mind for non-scientists: The Disordered Mind, Eric Kandel
Eric Kandel, among neuroscientists, is synonymous with his textbook Principles of Neural Science, a 1,700 page tome that has become the gold standard for a graduate level neuroscience education. In preparation for my preliminary exam in grad school, I distinctly remember reading the entire book cover-to-cover over the course of a week (and if that isn’t enough to deter you from a PhD program, just spend fifteen minutes on #AcademicTwitter to hear even worse horror stories).
Principles is dry. I love reading about electrophysiology and signal transduction and ion flow, but even I can admit that textbooks as a whole are dry by their very nature and purpose.
So, this chance to hear Kandel’s non-academic voice showed me the true personality of the brilliant Nobel laureate.
Here, Kandel discusses in broad strokes, some theories about our understanding of “disordered minds”: people with various psychiatric conditions ranging from schizophrenia to PTSD. Without getting too embedded in the nitty-gritty experiment-level details, Kandel summarizes just how the experts in the field believe that these conditions came to be, and what implications it has for therapeutic strategies.
1. Poneratoxin, a novel peptide neurotoxin from the venom of the ant, paraponera clavata