Skeptical Saturday: Pinktober

Think before you pink.

Talky Tuesday: Yoga

Since the topic came up in my last Talky Tuesday post, and since Natalie has been blogging about it as well, I figured I might as well get around to spilling my thoughts on yoga. Honestly, this was a topic I wanted to cover pretty early on when I came up with my Talky Tuesday idea but other, slightly more urgent things always seemed to take precedence. Now those are all out of my system (mostly) so I can finally put my thoughts on yoga out there.

My (Brief) History With Yoga

I first became aware that there was this thing called yoga at some point in high school. I picked up Teach Yourself Yoga at some point—I have a memory of it being in a gift shop at EPCOT, of all places—and made a few efforts to read up on the beginner asanas included in there, and to follow the recommended routine at the back. That didn't really pan out.

It wasn't until my junior year of college that I actually took a class. While I was still curious about yoga, at this point I just wanted the lowest-impact phys ed class possible (and I had already taken golf). Hah! Even though I had the world's gentlest, most mellow instructor—a beefy woman's lacrosse coach who practiced for the "chill out" benefits rather than the "sick flexibility gains" benefits—there were days when it kicked my ass. Nonetheless, it was a positive and encouraging experience, and I kept with it afterwards. I have yet to attend another class, though; I just practice on my own.

If you're a yoga nerd and would like me to be specific, by the way, the class was just typical hatha yoga.



My (Also Brief) History With Rinzai Zen Meditation

A couple of years after that yoga class, I graduated college. (Woohoo!) In the weird in-between time I spent at home, wondering what to do next, I stumbled across a meditation Meetup organized by a local Rinzai Zen Zendo. I continued to sit with them as long as I was home, returning when I could in between stints overseas.



How These Two Are Related

Image courtesy Jonathan Natiuk

Buddhism, or more specifically Zen meditation, has been the hip thing in the US since (arguably) the 1960s, thanks to beatniks and Shunryu Suzuki. Since then, meditation (Zen or otherwise) has gained a small foothold in both medicine and psychology as treatment option with a surprisingly high level of applicability. (Though of course there has also been a fair amount of skepticism and controversy. But that's another post. For now, I refer you to Jo Marchant's Cure, particularly Chapter 9: "Enjoy the Moment.")

Essential to both practices, at least how I learned them, is the concept of breath. In yoga, you attend to your breath, moving from one asana to another on inhales or exhales. In mindfulness meditation, you draw your attention to the here and now by focusing on your breathing. The method I was taught was to simply count my breaths backwards from 10, over and over.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see how the two practices can be merged. Ever since my experience with Zen meditation, I have tried to apply the principles of focused breathing during my yoga sessions. When you live in close quarters with another human, it can be a little weird to announce, "Okay, I'm going to sit on the edge of the bed and do nothing for five minutes, please don't disturb me." But there's nothing weird about saying, "Hey, I'm going to do a bit of yoga now."


My Subsequent Yoga Philosophy

People have all kinds of reasons for starting a yoga program. Everyone's reasons are their own, and they're equally valid, but given the way yoga is marketed and promoted, I think it's easy to miss the point.

When YouTube channel after YouTube channel and class after class features lithe, flexible young women, we get an idea about what yoga can do and also who yoga is for. The same goes for images of yoginis maintaining asanas that require an incredible amount of body strength.

"Wow," we think. "I want to be able to do that."

And I get it. If I can engage in gender stereotypes for a second, yoga is a really attractive way to get women who would otherwise be intimidated by strength training interested in...well, strength training. Not to mention that yoga helps with flexibility and balance—two skills we have heard again and again that we will lose in our old age (if we're not careful).

In all of this, yoga is a tool to change (or at least maintain) the body. We want to be stronger. We want to be more flexible. Brutal honesty time: we want to be thinner. (Isn't that what "stronger" and "more flexible" are often code words for? #realtalk) Whatever it is, we want to transform our body, whether in terms of appearance or ability. We also (again, #realtalk) want to cheat death and prolong the inevitable as much as we can. The longer we stay fit and flexible, the longer we have on this Earth, right?

These are admirable goals, I think. To the extent that they don't become a competition with yourself, anyway. Increasing my own level of aerobic fitness and learning to master and enjoy an activity I thought was not for me is certainly part of my own motivation behind my running while fat plan, after all.

Maybe it's because I'm pursuing those goals elsewhere that I have an entirely different take on yoga. Of course part of my yoga practice is centered around what I can do to support my new running habit (lots of tree pose), but the reason I keep coming back to the mat is that I just want to chill the fuck out. I don't go to any great lengths to push myself (which is why you'll never see me holding a plank for 10 minutes at a go) and I don't particularly care if I never truly master some asanas. I just want to spend some time in my head, without stimulation, and breathe for a little bit. When I carve out this time for myself, I benefit. My mood improves and I can come back to my work (writing, editing, lesson planning, promoting, crafting) with fresh eyes. Once in a while, ideas that have been percolating for years suddenly all come together in one eureka moment after another.

I'm not entirely on track with my 101 in 1001 goal of "1001 sun salutations." Like I said, I have my ups and downs. But even if I were, I can't imagine that I would be anywhere near capable of performing fantastic yogini feats. My yoga victories, such as they are, are inconsequential. Teeny tiny. Maybe yoga on the daily for a whole week, or having a reeeaaaal niiiice streeeeetch in pigeon pose before I go out running. (Oh, and by the way: my ass hovers quite a few inches off the floor in pigeon pose.) That's okay! It's okay to be team Tiny Yoga Victories. I'm right there with you.

Review: What is Fat For?: Rethinking Obesity Science

Next up in my parade of non-fiction books is What is Fat For? Ignatius Brady, a science writer and weight loss clinician, has synthesized what I think can officially be called a "boat load" of research and his experience as a medical professional working with what we term the "morbidly obese" into an intriguing, eminently readable, and compassionate book.

I've voiced my skepticism of, and exasperation with, the diet mythos before. If you just started following me (like, I don't know, through the #sciart or the recent Book Blogger Appreciation Week Twitter events...!), you can watch me lose my mind at diet culture and at BMI as a meaningful metric. These things touch a nerve with me because I was a fat kid, and now I'm definitely a fat adult. (Haters to the left!) I won't get into my life story here; that's fodder for a Talky Tuesday post, maybe. But I think it's important to know where I was coming from in reading this book, and what I was hoping to get out of it.

To the point: Brady is a skilled and readable science writer, so the book is a breeze. I've read a lot of non-fiction in my day, and I've found that the science-related ones fall into two camps: they either cite specific studies and sources and work to interpret and explain the results and how they fit into the author's larger thesis (Cure was really good at this) or they simply state an opinion/trend with a vague "studies have shown" and then fail to specifically name or explain the studies (except in the bibliography). Brady manages to make ideas clear and easy to understand and treats you like a reasonably intelligent adult who lacks the specific knowledge (or access) to interpret data and medical studies.

Brady is also extremely careful about the implications of much of his research. One of the building blocks in his argument is the protein leverage hypothesis: that obesity rates are connected with a deficiency in protein in the modern diet.

See, you read something like that, and you think: "Wow, there's the silver bullet! I'll just eat nothing but protein and I'll be wearing a size 2 by Christmas!"

Brady knows exactly how this will come off, and so he carefully (and responsibly, IMO) mitigates it with the warning that we still don't know what happens when we eat too much protein (preliminary data seem to suggest that, among other things, excessive protein might be damaging for the kidneys), that adipose tissue (fat) serves a protective and necessary role, and that given humans' universal tendency to gain weight over time (about a pound per year), almost anything that causes prolonged, effortless weight loss probably has some kind of scary side effect or cause (illnesses such as cancer or thyroid dysfunction). Also, many of the health conditions we associate with obesity turn out not to have much of a correlation with weight at all. Smoking is still worse for you than being a fatty, turns out!

That is what sets this book apart from fad diet and "nutrition" books. Brady doesn't assume that you want to go on a diet or lose weight, but rather that you have a genuine curiosity about the body and how it works. He emphasizes again and again that we should not only stop seeing obesity as a problem of will power, but as a problem at all. He's not selling you a miracle diet, a meal plan, or a training regimen. He's just a guy who's found a lot of interesting research and wants to share it with you, which makes it the best kind of science reading.

That said, at the end of the day you're still relying on the author to be correctly interpreting this data for us. Brady is the one with access to the papers: not me, and not you. All of my gut (haha) instincts point to him being knowledgeable in the field, familiar enough with the terminology and the requisite background information, and just generally clear-eyed (and honest) enough to see the data for what they are (more or less) and not for what he wants them to be (more or less) or for what will sell a book (more or less). But then, I went into this book pretty much agreeing with Brady from the get-go, so I'll admit I didn't come at this one with a critical, defensive edge.

And it would be hard for me to do that, anyway, since I'm not a doctor! But I also finished this right after a much more irritating book that had me side-eyeing at every turn; with What is Fat For? I just wanted to sit back, relax, and learn.

The only moment the book made me stop and go "hmmmm =/" for a moment was just one or two parts on the topic of exercise that seemed to understate what its effects on health (unrelated to getting smaller). Yes, exercise alone certainly won't make you smaller, but it still seems to have demonstrably (and dramatically) good effects on health otherwise. While life is too short to waste time on things you hate (why I'll never run a marathon), there are probably appropriate and fun ways to move for almost every body (and everybody). Even if I'll never run a marathon, I love going on walks, yoga, and weight lifting. (And back in the day, running regularly did make a significant dent in my blood pressure. But I also hated running.) Naturally, everyone gets to decide for themselves if they're going to move and how much, but we can still admit that it's a good thing.

This is certainly the highest-quality self-published book I've read yet, bar none. The more I think about it, though, the more I'm wondering: why self-publish? The topic is popular enough, and the writing is good enough, that any publisher would have picked it up in a heartbeat. Considering that legacy publishers put out victim-blaming woo garbage like The Secret without a second thought, I doubt the means of What is Fat For?'s release into the book wilds indicate anything about the veracity of the claims therein. But it's enough to nag.

Content aside, there are a few formatting problems. Of course, I'd rather read excellent, focused writing with formatting issues than mediocre writing that's perfectly formatted, so this is a small complaint, but it's worth noting.

NetGalley sent me the eBook version, and the formatting on this is a mess. A hot mess. I don't know if it was some kind of XML error or just the difference between how something looks on a Kindle versus on the Kindle app on a smartphone, but on about half of the pages there would be bizarre word smashes.

It's easier if I show you:

At first glance it looks fine, but look carefully at that black space between the last two "paragraphs": those aren't different paragraphs, but just one with some weirdness in it, thanks to a misplaced block of empty space:

"While there may be a way to present an argument in either field using just logic and pure reason, math becomes complex necessary as the questions become more and better defined."

If you don't read carefully, that might still sound okay. But look closer: "math becomes complex necessary..."

From the best I can gather, it should read:

"While there may be a way to present an argument in either field using just logic and pure reason, as the questions become more and better defined complex math becomes necessary."

Or maybe something similar. There was something like this on every page. Sometimes I could sort it, but other times it was impossible to make out.

"His by recognizing this: Hunger is we modern, complicated, guilty, mouth dries; he can barely swallow, but manages."

I don't even know what to make of that. And I can't check it on any of my other eBook reading apps (I have Google Play Books, UB Reader, and GooteBooks), so I don't know if it's a Kindle thing or a this file thing or my phone thing or what.

Likewise, there are a few charts and graphs in the book, and most of them are essentially non-existent. Many of the graphs turn up as a list of their Y-axis values. Charts are squashed into incoherence.

Both of these problems seem to be an inherent issue with dealing with the eBook format. Maybe this is where the budget ran out? The author info also mentions something about a website (WhatIsFatFor.com or some such) but as of this writing it seems to be defunct, without even a trace on Archive.Org. The book isn't old by any means, so: has the website just not launched yet? is it just temporarily down? Did Brady decide to pull it?

All in all, I enjoyed What is Fat For? and I'd recommend it for your own reading (fun facts!) and as a part of a Health At Every Size/Fat Acceptance library/GP toolkit.

As this was a free book from NetGalley, I'm obligated to let you know that I received it  in exchange for an honest review. 

What I Read: Cure

A perpetual item on my 101 in 1001 list (guess I should update about that one at some point! today is not that day, though) is to read one nonfiction book a month. I love novels and literature, but I also am endlessly curious about the world around me. So you can imagine how my eyes lit up when I saw that Cure was one of the books available for me on Blogging For Books. I requested it the same day I signed up and, after a little futzing around with NetGalley and Amazon, I dove right in.

Image courtesy Crown Publishers

The full title is Cure: A Journey Into the Science of Mind Over Body, and it's right what it says on the tin. The one thing I'd like to add is that when Marchant uses the word "science" in the subtitle there, she means good, solid science—not some fuzzier woo usage of "science." The entire book is built on extensive interviews with professional scientists: experts in medicine, human physiology, biology, genetics, and so forth. It's also built on the premise that Western, evidence-based medicine mostly works and has been a net boon to society. There is no "you can cure your cancer with positive thinking!" or "vaccines cause autism!" quackery going on here.

The reasonable hypothesis that Marchant explores in the book is that the placebo effect, as well as feeling cared for, is an underrated and potentially immensely useful tool in our healthcare arsenal. For many people with a more materialist view of things, this can seem like nonsense, or uncomfortably close to lying. Materialism—that all we are is the body and its physical components and interactions—has driven Western medicine for years. Marchant challenges that view and offers a more pragmatic one: however you feel about the inherent honesty of offering a placebo, we can't deny that the placebo effect works.

There is case study after case study in her book about chronically ill patients who, say, underwent a sham surgery and still reported a drastic decrease in pain and quality of life; or who have been able to reduce the dosage of powerful immuno-suppressive or stimulant drugs by taking a placebo alongside their regular medication, or by forging strong mental associations between their medicine and a particular concept. They're all fascinating to read, and Marchant approaches all of them with respect and good-natured interest without veering into condescension. It's pretty much impossible for me to pick a favorite; instead, I want to focus on the  limits of the placebo effect.

Marchant gets to the limits of what the placebo effect can do right in the first chapter (though not before a juicy hook, natch). It has to do with altitude sickness.

Fabrizio Benedetti has a high-altitude lab in the Alps. I don't know how he finds study subjects, but he does—and he encourages them to travel to his lab as quickly as possible, rather than the suggested staggered journey, so as to maximize their altitude sickness. Then he runs all kinds of tests with diodes and treadmills and real oxygen and fake oxygen.

The results are multifaceted, but they're consistent: in a nutshell, a placebo can't fix the physical thing wrong with you (in the case of altitude sickness: a lack of oxygen in your blood), but it can do a lot to mitigate your brain's reaction to what's wrong with you—which is often what causes the worst symptoms of a sickness. In Marchant's words: "Breathing fake oxygen can cause the brain to respond as if there is more oxygen in the air, but it cannot increase the underlying level of oxygen in the blood."

Everything else that Marchant discusses later, which sometimes borders on what some would call "the miraculous," remains well within that boundary. She also points out the pitfalls of going too far woo: namely, that if you subscribe to a philosophy that illness is entirely in your mind, then when you become gravely ill, you will blame yourself for it, which is about the worst guilt trip of all time. (This victim-blaming mentality is why I side-eye The Secret so very hard.) The book is overall hopeful and fuzzy feel-goody, but this particular encounter stands out as a stark warning:

"One problem, of course, is that patients who adopt alternative medicines do not always have a positive outcome. While researching this book, for example, I met 37-year-old Tunde Balogh. Originally from Hungary, she lives in Ireland with her husband and young son...A year earlier, she had been diagnosed with cancer in her right breast. 'I was so against doctors, hospitals, nurses,' she told me, '...I knew inside—if I caused this I can fix this.' Then she found German New Medicine, which teaches that cancer is caused by emotional conflict...Tunde says this resonated with her, because insecurities about her body had been causing her to distance herself from her husband. 'Why did you do that, now you have cancer!' she says. 'It took me around six months to forgive myself.' 

But her cancer wasn't cured. In January 2014, she started suffering from searing joint pains; the disease had spread to her bones. 'Cancer in the bones is when you don't feel valuable,' she says. She stood in front of the bedroom mirror each day, repeating: 'I'm valuable. I love myself.' 

By June, Tunde struggled to walk and was in severe pain. She was as convinced as ever that the answer was inside her, though, and still searching for a cure."

There is definitely a place for evidence-based medicine in Marchant's schema. Not only that; it's absolutely essential. Nearly all of the best possible effects and outcomes in Marchant's case studies are due to the combination of evidence-based medicine and the placebo effect, rather than just one or the other.

Still, even within those limits, the placebo effect can accomplish some incredible things. The only question Marchant doesn't really touch on (and this may be because we don't know the answer yet) is why the placebo effect works for some people, but not others. Is it just random? Does it have to do with personality, habits, psychology?

There's more to this book than the placebo effect. Marchant also investigates, to a more limited extent, the social determinants of health, defined by the WHO as "the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life." It's not just genetics and lifestyle choices that affect your health: where you're born, what kind of lives your parents and even grandparents had (separate from the genetic predispositions they passed on to you), and even the kind of stresses and relationships you had as child and teenager all seem to have long-lasting physiological effects.

All in all, Cure is a quick but by no means shallow read. Some might accuse Marchant of trying to pander, or to play to both sides (instead of coming down hard on woo), but I think those critics are coming down way too harsh. The truth is, our brain is a fantastically complex organ and not only do we not know how it all works, we don't even know how much we don't know. Even if just a handful of the therapies Marchant investigates were to bear out in real life use, it would mean an incredible improvement in the quality of life for millions of people worldwide. Hopefully Cure will nudge the popular and medical consciousness towards implementing these therapies.



I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley and Blogging For Books in exchange for an honest review. And trust me: I don't hold back when I think something is bullshit.

Science Saturday: Thesis Art

A blog that's been on my feed for ages now is The Finch and Pea. It's a science blog for everyone, but it's particularly been at the nexus of the recent (ish?) sciart movement. See, if you're not following The Finch and Pea, you might miss out on cool stuff like this thesis art.

"Beat Poetry" by Stephen Gaeta

I love this trend of word art (like, I'm sure I'm the last book nerd on the Internet to discover Litographs.com) and I appreciate how it's reminiscent of old plate engravings used for science illustrations back in the day. Very, very fitting!

Newly Listed: Speed of Light in Snow Quartz and Faceted Amethyst

Back when I was working on SUPER SEKRIT PROJECT (it's done now; all that's left is to count down the days until I can share it with you!), I bought a whole bunch of a kind of stone entirely new to me: snow quartz (also called snowy quartz, milky quartz, and white quartz). It was something I could use in so many projects, when moonstone was too expensive and when mother-of-pearl was too warm.

In so many projects, it turned out, that I used it all up before writing a geo-shopping post about it. Oops!

In the meantime, feast your eyes on this latest piece of sciart jewelry: the speed of light in snow quartz, with faceted amethyst acting as spacers.

Speed of light bracelet by Kokoba

This is only the second speed of light piece in my shop and (according to my photo backlog) the third I've ever done. How could I forget one of the most important physical constants there is? I don't know, but I'm determined to rectify that situation.

This would be a great gift for any physics nerds or hard SF fans you know, whether for Valentine's day or for a February birthday (since amethyst is February's birthstone).

Last week, I decided to dig on Etsy for some #sciart finds. This week I originally planned on searching on Pinterest, but you know what? Either Pinterest users are idiots, or there is something fucky with their algorithms (why not both?), because the vast majority of stuff that turns up when you search for "#sciart" is fairies and fantasy things. And, for some reason, fashion color palette advice based on your "season."

Meanwhile, if you search #sciart on Twitter, you get some really nifty new stuff! Like neurons painted in sumi-e style:

#SciArt member Gregory Dunn paints the elegant forms of neurons in the Asian sumi-e style. https://t.co/Mzq7JuTxdt pic.twitter.com/5gBEqHkRG2

— SciArt Center (@thesciartcenter) January 11, 2016

Some immunology jewelry from the fantastic Vexed Muddler:

Antibodies more your style? How about an IgM pentamer? #SciArt #immunology https://t.co/OQVnaa6iMy pic.twitter.com/OAolMK47He

— the vexed muddler (@vexedmuddler) January 10, 2016

And some breathtaking marine biology:

Octopoteuthis deletron a midwater octopus. https://t.co/lsvfZtl75D #sciart. I have been ill… https://t.co/G4NgcFl7aI pic.twitter.com/EmEllKSSpX

— Kelly Lance (@2Bfreelance) January 9, 2016

So, sorry Pinterest: you were a cool idea but for now I'm going to stick to recipes, thanks.

Five Fandom Friday: Favorite Halloween Episodes

Image courtesy Katelyn Jade

Since it seems like Nerdy Girlie and Super Space Chick have left this spot blank, I can just continue on my week-delayed 5 Fandom Friday posts and then next week I'll be on track. All right!!

So, my favorite Halloween specials, then. Truth be told, I don't watch a lot of TV. (I feel like I bring this up a lot in 5 Fandom Friday, but it's true.) So allow me to reach a bit:

5. The "Treehouse of Horror" episodes (The Simpsons)

Image courtesy Mrfebruary / Wikimedia

I'm not enough of a Simpsons fan to be able to sort all of the "Treehouse..." episodes from memory, but I always like watching one if it's on! I like that the one-off nature of the episodes lets the writers do crazy, off-the-wall things with characters that are otherwise well-established and hard to kill, and I also like when they reference classic gothic, horror, or science fiction stories.


4. "Epidemiology" (Community)

Image courtesy Keith McDuffee

Community's take on zombies and zombie tropes is, as usual, dead on. Pun intended.


3. The Twilight Zone

Really, isn't every episode of The Twilight Zone a Halloween episode, one way or another?


2. "Catspaw" (Star Trek: The Original Series)

Witches of Pyris VII, courtesy Memory Alpha

As far as Star Trek TOS episodes go, "Catspaw" is pretty meh. But once you know what to expect out of it (hint: it's not great science fiction or drama), it's goofy and fun. So much camp. So much.


1. It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

I mean, come on. It's the Great Pumpkin! Though I never understood who the awful adults were that kept giving Charlie Brown rocks. That's just a bridge too far! Poor Charlie Brown.

When Faced With the Pink Wave of October

Bear these things in mind:

CDC statistics on the leading causes of death in women in the US.

Welcome to Cancerland: Barbara Ehrenreich's breast cancer experience

Science Saturday: International Women's Day

March is Women's History Month; March 8th is celebrated around the globe as International Women's Day. Granted, some countries are more interested in observing it than others. What an opportunity, then, to highlight some of the overlooked and unsung heroines in STEM on this Science Saturday!

Perhaps one of the biggest things that keep women (and I mean women systemically, as a whole; individual women have individual experiences that deviate from the norm in all kinds of ways) out of STEM fields is the "you can't be what you can't see" phenomenon. After hundreds of years men doing most of the heavy academic lifting because women were rarely given a chance, a vicious cycle was set up: men were given a head start, made a good portion of the significant breakthrough in the early years of "science" (after the painful separation from its conjoined twin, "natural philosophy"), and so it was that science became a de facto masculine set of fields with male pioneers. We can't know how many female Lavoisiers or Copernicuses or Galileos there could have been had they been given equal education and access to the same resources.

Even when women were finally given access to the same education, habit or prejudice or a combination of the two often resulted in their discoveries and contributions being minimized or ascribed to male colleagues. This erasure has finally begun to be addressed, and the result is that every day there seems to be a new STEM innovator whose share of the spotlight would no doubt had been greater if she had been born a man. Scientific American has a great collection of art depicting a few of these interesting and brilliant women; I encourage you to click through and browse the entire collection. (It includes a print from the Mad Scientists of Etsy's own resident marine geophysicist artist and new mom, minouette!)

Inge Lehmann linocut by minouette

STEM fields are ever improving their gender equity, over the long run. Disparities remain in many fields, but they are being addressed and treated as the serious issues they are. The CataLyst series over on STEMinist.com has just begun to look at these issues and the many underlying reasons, so make sure to keep an eye on that corner of the web for studies and commentary on the topic. And while the Wikipedia Women in Science Edit-a-thon is over, the work is far from done. Anyone concerned about the representation of women in science should register as an editor and contribute to articles on women scientists or even write new ones. Finally, make it a point to actively seek out, celebrate, and learn about the women in science of today and yesterday. Share stories and images on social media to signal boost their accomplishments and to normalize images of women in the sciences. Here are just a few to get started:

Ify Aniebo is getting her PhD in medicine from Oxford, conducted HIV/AIDS research in Swaziland, and one day hopes to cure malaria.

Ruby Hirose made significant contributions to the polio vaccine.

Rosalyn Sussman Yalow won a Nobel Prize for developing the radioimmunoassay technique, which dramatically improved allergy tests.

Barbara McClintock also won a Nobel Prize for her work in genetics; specifically, the idea of genetic recombination in maize.

Who are your favorite women in science?

What I'm reading:

It's slow going at first, as Dr. Sacks goes into detail about the condition Encephalitis lethargica.  At least it was slow going for me, being that I'm not as well-versed in neurology as other sciences.  In a nutshell, Encephalitis lethargica leaves the victim trapped in a frozen statue of a body, able to think and perceive but unable to easily control their own bodies. There was an outbreak of it in the early years of the 20th century, and then for whatever reason, it more or less subsided.

Beyond the first chapter it's much easier going, as Dr. Sacks recounts his experience with a vast number of patients in the late '60s and early '70s.  By this point, many of his patients had been "stuck" (so to speak) for forty or fifty years.  Upon the administration of the drug L-DOPA, many of these patients suddenly and almost violently "woke up," and Awakenings  is a collection of the stories of these, well, awakenings.  I'm going to have to watch the movie once I finish.

What are you reading?