NYTimes ScienceTimes: The bad choices in pancreatic cancer, rare applause for adipocytes, and a sort-of-Darwinian theory of who gets rich
The advance tease for the ScienceTimes lead story by Denise Grady, on pancreatic cancer, was that it is about women whose family history of the deadly disease prompts them to have their pancreases removed.
It’s almost surely a life saver for many, but it’s a drastic move — immediate, profound diabetes results. But the story is about far more than that. Grady uses such desperation as a reference point for an authoritative review of the many avenues medical researchers are following in hope of finding vastly better diagnostic, preventive, and healing measures for this most fatal of common cancers. It is medical writing on both clinical and scientific matters of a high order. Don’t miss sidebar on Jimmy Carter’s family and its onslaught of pancreatic cancer.
The oddity of the section this week is Nicholas Wade’s review of a UC Davis economic historian’s book on a new theory of wealth and civilization. It’s not so much the review that’s odd — although it gets notably big play — but the book. Its thesis, it says here, arises from detailed review of data on English demographics and wealth distribution before, during, and after the industrial revolution. It is that evolutionary selection pressure shifted English genetic makeup, in just a few centuries, away from Malthusian manacles and toward dispositions more amenable to capitalism and middle-class values. The result was a people more able to thrive without consuming themselves right back into medieval lord-and-serf poverty. Hmmm. Well, the book, doubtless now, will be a best seller. Something smells of western, almost Victorian, Anglo-Saxon-Protestant triumphalism here. The Tracker wonders how, if it took centuries of inadvertent selective breeding feedback to make the English economy go modern, Japan’s Meiji restoration (for just one example) achieved much the same, wealth-generating change of society in a generation.
Going on too long here.
Other notables include:
Natalie Angier : Its Poor Reputation Aside, Our Fat Is Doing Us a Favor in which she explains why fat cells need some appreciation.
Dennis Overbye: What’s in a Name? Parsing the ‘God Particle,’ the Ultimate Metaphor , An essay for all the people who complain religious imagery is out of place in science stories. Fat chance of that, one thinks -many of the best literary explorations of awe and wonder are in scriptures. Science evokes the same feelings sometimes. It’s not just the lingo of Christian creationism that’s being cadged, anyway. Should Oppenheimer be scolded for musing on the Bhagavad-Gita and Vishnu as Trinity’s fireball rose? Shall we retire “Promethian” as a descriptor of technical audacity.
William J. Broad: From Fresh Ideas and Better Steel, Safer Bridges . Wreckage and smashed cars in the Mississippi aside, bridge builders are getting better and better in the US and, even more, elsewhere. China especially. Pic above is of a Tampa Bay bridge.
Plus lots more on uterine fibroids, the astronaut-teacher and her dreams, flying reptiles and how they caught fish, and so on. Whole section lineup is here.
-CP
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