Tag Archives: science writing

The Poisoner’s Handbook by Deborah Blum

Poisoners-Handbook-coverI have to admit I felt a little weird about leaving this book lying out on my kitchen table.

The Poisoner’s Handbook by Deborah Blum isn’t a how-to guide (no, honestly). Rather, it’s an investigation into one of the most toxic eras of U.S. history: the 1920’s. It follows the story of Charles Norris, the first chief medical examiner of New York City as he investigates case after case of people killed by common household products.

Each chapter focuses on one particular poisonous substance and is organized like a murder mystery, which I thought was a great decision. The suspense of trying to figure out whodunit by the end of the chapter causes you to forget that this book is a work of nonfiction and everything in it actually happened. It’s horrifying to read about what people were exposed to in an era when the FDA was little more than a joke and we didn’t know much about toxicology. We used to fumigate houses with cyanide gas and burn pure carbon monoxide as a lamp fuel. That’s pretty bad, but how about arsenic in makeup? That still doesn’t take the cake. Radium, the stuff that’s so radioactive that it glows blue in the dark, was in people’s health tonics. There were as many cases of accidental poisonings in this book as there were murders.

Throughout the book, Norris and his chief toxicologist Alexander Gettler use science to tease out what happened to the bodies that show up in their morgue. Their evidence helps to catch several murderers, and even more gratifying to read about, they clear the name of people who didn’t do it. If you’ve got a morbid streak, or even if you’re just curious about the history of science, I recommend it.

This is neat: 3D printing makes replacement bones

At the National Association of Science Writers conference last October, I got to listen to a number of scientists give talks about the coolest things that are going on in their fields today.  One of these cool, cool scientists is Dr. Ola Harrysson, an associate professor of industrial and systems engineering at North Carolina State University.  He’s teamed up with Dr. Denis Marcellin-Little of the veterinary school at NC State to engineer better bone prostheses for pets.

One of the reasons owners come to Harrysson and Marcellin-Little is when a beloved pet gets osteosarcoma, a cancer of the bone.  Veterinarians can receive the diseased bone and save the pet’s life, but the limb with the missing bone is now useless.

For example, this is Cyrano, a cat who lost part of his knee to osteosarcoma.  He received a knee replacement from the team in 2012.

Image taken by Allen Breed. Courtesy of Yahoo news.

First, the team takes a CT scan of the affected limb.  Using computer aided design, they create a 3D model of what a bone prosthetic to fill in the gap would look like.

In the old days, the metal alloy used to make the prosthetic would then have to be cast or wrought into the precise shape needed for the final product.  Metal casting and working are extremely expensive when the final product has a complex shape, such as a bone prosthetic, and only one of the product will ever be needed.

That’s where Harrysson’s engineering expertise comes into play.  Harrysson collaborates with the company Arcam AB, which developed a rapid-prototyping machine (commonly known as 3D printing) that can work with molten metal.  First, a layer of powdered metal alloy is spread out on a surface.  The rapid-prototyping machine uses the data from the computer aided design program to selectively fuse regions of the powdered metal with an electron beam.  Then another layer of powdered metal is spread on top of the surface and the process repeats.

The machine builds up layer after layer of fused-together metal until the bone prosthetic is complete.

Here’s what the machine looks like:

From Arcam AB’s website.

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Here’s a model of Cyrano’s new knee.  That’s Dr. Marcellin-Little in the foreground.

Image courtesy of NC State University website.

The prosthetic is then implanted into the pet.  Because the edges of the prosthetic are porous, bone cells grow into the gaps and the prosthetic ultimately fuses with the animal’s own bones.

Dr. Harrysson and Dr. Marcellin-Little have given bone prosthetics to eight animals so far.  Now that he has received the knee replacement, Cyrano’s prognosis is excellent.

Here’s a link to NC State’s page about the work.

Two Books on Science Writing

You might know that I’ve been taking a class on science writing for popular audiences this semester.  There are two required readings for the course, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011, ed. Mary Roach, and A Field Guide for Science Writers, ed. Deborah Blum, Mary Knudson, and Robin Marantz Henig, and I’ve been enjoying them so much that they’ve become oatmeal reading.  Wait, didn’t you know that?  I do all my reading for fun over oatmeal in the morning.

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Source: Amazon

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011  The book is pretty much what it sounds like: a collection of the best stuff published in popular science magazines in 2011.  The articles range in subject from how you collect semen samples from chimpanzees* to shock reporting on the Gulf oil spill to a meditation on the limits of what physics might be able to discover.  The book feels like reading many issues of Discover magazine and The New Yorker, because that’s where many of these articles come from.  Except that this book is a highlights reel.

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Source: Goodreads

A Field Guide for Science Writers  This is pretty exciting stuff, because it gets into the nuts and bolts of how one goes about writing about science.  The book is divided into sections, one of which is about actually writing well, one about the peculiarities of certain fields such as medicine, and one about working in all the various print markets.  Print markets.  The biggest problem with this book is that it was published in 2006, and the written word has been through an upheaval since then.  I’d recommend this book for the section on craft alone, but the ten pages on writing for the Web left me wanting more.

I’m leaving this class with more conviction than ever that science writing is very cool stuff.  What could be better than science and writing put together?

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*  A section of PVC pipe lined with K-Y Jelly, in case you were wondering.