Research, race, and reservations

Happy Sunday. If you’re enjoying this month’s book, Valley of Forgetting, I wanted to share a few other reads I think you might want to make time for.

But first, a reminder that we are meeting this week to talk with the author, Jennie Erin Smith!

Jennie spent years working on the book (just as she did her first, Stolen World) and getting deep inside the science, the scientists, and the families involved in Colombia’s Alzheimer’s study, and I’m excited to hear a lot more about that journey and what’s next.

We’ll convene on Thursday January 22nd at 6pm Eastern/5pm Central/3pm Pacific, and she’ll be with us for an hour to discuss the book. 

We’ll talk about how she was drawn into the story, and what’s happened to some of the folks since she finished writing—as well as the state of Alzheimer’s research. Do you have any questions? Join us and ask them yourself… and if you’re not able to make it just drop me a line by replying to this message and I’ll ask on your behalf.

I’ll send an email out with Zoom details in a couple of days: I really hope you’re able to join us.

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As I read Valley of Forgetting, I was reminded of plenty of other stories—I always find that books connect together in this way for me, particularly really good ones. I thought about authors who laid out intimate, careful descriptions of scientific research; who built human-centered stories about ethically-complicated topics; books that really got under the skin of something important.

There are plenty of great science books, but the nature of a book-length project means that writers often take a look across a whole field or a set of related ideas and draw them together. You can see that direction in some of our previous picks, like Carl Elliott’s The Occasional Human Sacrifice (CUR002) on unethical medical research, or Nicola Twilley’s Frostbite (CUR005), about the history of refrigeration.

Valley of Forgetting takes the other direction: to look into a single situation very deeply. This zoomed-in approach is where I found the most connections with other work.

Let’s begin with perhaps the most famous science book of the last generation, Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. It covers some similar areas to Valley—for example the way that human cells are used by scientists and researchers, the money and power involved in scientific studies, and the ethical (or unethical) behavior that swirls around this huge industry. Smith actually refers to the Lacks case on a few occasions, not least when a woman with remarkable DNA emerges in the Alzheimer’s study, and it’s for good reason. I think Skloot’s book really changed the way we look at scientific history, and if you haven’t read it I would definitely put it on your bedside table.  

(If you’ve already devoured Skloot, another historical microscope came in the form of Adam Higginbotham’s Challenger (CUR010), which is similarly meticulous in its reconstruction of past events though in a different way.)

For a different way to look at the realities of scientific research, meanwhile, you might want to read Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl: A Memoir. So many science biographies are “great men” books, focused on the tremendous discoveries of individual researchers, which often ignore collaborators or complexity in favor of a heroic narrative. 

That’s one of the traps that Jennie Erin Smith avoids by never getting too far inside the aura of the scientists she’s writing about. But Jahren’s book is another twist on that formula: a bottom-up examination of what science looks like. Infused with personal insight, Jahren shows how research is often tedious and deliberate and hard, but sometimes truly exhilarating. It’s a complicated, human, honest look at the life of a researcher.

Last up, I thought of Sierra Crane Murdoch’s Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder and a Woman’s Search for Justice in Indian Country. This isn’t a science book, but it does a remarkable job of embedding with people and exploring their world in a way that felt similar to Valley. Just as Colombia’s paisa folks are often stereotyped and ignored, so Yellow Bird looks at the Arikara tribe in North Dakota. Crane Murdoch’s eye is both sympathetic and questioning, and the world she depicts feels fully-realized. There’s a mystery to pull you through, but in the end Yellow Bird is about something bigger and more expansive than true crime.

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Any other books that came to mind while you were reading Valley of Forgetting? Email me to let me know—and until next time,

Onwards

Bobbie