The author of Making Babies (2001) takes a lively, witty tour of the X chromosome, creator of “a delicious asymmetry between men and women.”
Bainbridge (Comparative Anatomy and Physiology/Royal Veterinary College, London) begins by introducing an embryo that has not yet become either a boy or a girl baby and demonstrating how, for humans, the specialized X and Y sex chromosomes come into play. The default sex of an embryo is female; the presence of a Y chromosome is necessary to turn it into a male. While at first Y might seem the more powerful of the sex chromosomes, it is nearly empty of genes and almost incapable of doing anything other than control sex. Its counterpart, X, however, has profound effects on our lives and well-being. Bainbridge poses two questions: How do males cope with having just one X chromosome? How do females cope with having two? In a chapter on sex-linked diseases bearing the inspired title “The Duke of Kent’s Testicles,” he relates how hemophilia, a blood-clotting disorder transmitted by a damaged X chromosome, spread through certain royal families of Europe. Whereas girls inheriting this damaged X are protected by their spare, undamaged X chromosome, boys, having but a single X, become the victims of a life-threatening disease. Female bodies, on the other hand, says Bainbridge, lead a kind of double life owing to the X chromosome. Except for the germ cells, which later give rise to eggs, every cell in the female embryo switches off one of its X chromosomes, apparently at random. This makes every female body a complex mosaic: half the cells have an X chromosome from the mother, half from the father. Within this entertaining and informative, if slightly too brief account, the author intersperses two essays on the biology of the X chromosome; an epilogue considers some of the ramifications of sex selection.
A fine demonstration of science made accessible. (4 line drawings)Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-674-01028-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
Categories: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | NATURE | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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Bryson (I'm a Stranger Here Myself, 1999, etc.), a man who knows how to track down an explanation and make it confess, asks the hard questions of science—e.g., how did things get to be the way they are?—and, when possible, provides answers.
As he once went about making English intelligible, Bryson now attempts the same with the great moments of science, both the ideas themselves and their genesis, to resounding success. Piqued by his own ignorance on these matters, he’s egged on even more so by the people who’ve figured out—or think they’ve figured out—such things as what is in the center of the Earth. So he goes exploring, in the library and in company with scientists at work today, to get a grip on a range of topics from subatomic particles to cosmology. The aim is to deliver reports on these subjects in terms anyone can understand, and for the most part, it works. The most difficult is the nonintuitive material—time as part of space, say, or proteins inventing themselves spontaneously, without direction—and the quantum leaps unusual minds have made: as J.B.S. Haldane once put it, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.” Mostly, though, Bryson renders clear the evolution of continental drift, atomic structure, singularity, the extinction of the dinosaur, and a mighty host of other subjects in self-contained chapters that can be taken at a bite, rather than read wholesale. He delivers the human-interest angle on the scientists, and he keeps the reader laughing and willing to forge ahead, even over their heads: the human body, for instance, harboring enough energy “to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.”
Loads of good explaining, with reminders, time and again, of how much remains unknown, neatly putting the death of science into perspective.Pub Date: May 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-7679-0817-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
Categories: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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