A book review leads the section. It’s a picture book by a grad student in neuroscience, and the Times’s writerly doctor on-call, Abigail Zuger, M.D., writes it up in style that persuades readers – me, anyway – that the book is well worth consideration. It’s shopping season after all, and coffee tables have needs. It’s also a bit frustrating, this article is. The book takes advantage of the remarkable ways that microscopists and radiologists and such are able, thanks to selective flourescent tags, dyes, and presumably some digitizing artistry, to turn the brownish gray floop that is brain tissue into stunning riots of color and delicacy. But Zuger’s prose describes a different selection of arresting images than the ones that run with the story. The print edition’s captions don’t say what we’re looking at. What is that array of ivory-hued nerve axons and ganglia, what’s the brown membrane they’re splayed across, what’s the green moss poking through? No clue.  Go on line though,it is all explained. Turns out, that pic I mentioned is of neurons cultured in a lab dish. Spend all that money for a NYT subscription and the paper doesn’t explain what you’re looking at? Go on line for free, and there it all is in glorious detail?  We’ve all noticed it already. The newspaper business is nuts.

Other headlines to note:

• Andrew Pollack: Fuel Lines Of Tumors Are New Target ; Read this and remember it next time you wish there were more science stories on the research itself, rather than a heated announcement of a potential breakthrough thanks to research that has a big punctuation mark in it. Pollack talks to several teams, academic and drug industry affiliated, trying to gum up cancer cells’ normal voracious capacity to yank glucose from the blood stream and use it for rapid growth. All solid science, explained about as clearly as can be without losing  readers in metabolic pathways. Thus, salute! But so far, it’s all good-looking research protocols with no clear path to clinical application. As narratives go, this lacks the satisfaction of some sort of resolution. At least Pollack won’t have many or even any desperate patients contacting him, heart-breakingly pleading to know how to get the latest putative future and maybe miracle cure.
• John Tierney: Murder! Intrigue! Astronomers? ; We’ve probably all seen the news recently of an exhumation in Prague of Tycho Brahe, the great Danish astronomer with the metallic false nose. Tierney spins its elements of murder mystery into a scenario. Which is, how will or might movie makers work this up? That’s clever, well executed for the most part. But I cannot agree with his cynical presumption that astronomers like Tycho and Kepler would not make compelling protagonists when it comes to popular taste. Hmmph. Astronomers are thoroughly attractive heroes and villains for drama (says the one-time astronomy major who was no damned good at it, but now occasionally writes about it). Personally, I’d say a historic 18th century dramatic movie about the Royal Society, William Herschel, and their time’s condescending treatment of his devoted, comet-snaring sister Caroline – a rather accomplished natural scientist herself – would be gripping.
• Donald G. McNeil Jr. – Sierra Leone: Outbreak of Mysterious Blisters Is Case Study In Spread of Panic ; A brief, and an infuriating one. It’s not McNeil that gets the blood up, but the events he relates. Interesting is that the press, in two episodes of epidemiology and gullible or sensation-seeking reporters, committed considerable mischief with, in one episode, tragic result.

As usual, much more: Whole Science Section and not just in the section ;

- Charlie Petit

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