Growing up next to a secret nuclear facility

Michael Marshall, environment reporter

KRISTEN IVERSEN grew up close to a nuclear weapons factory. The Rocky Flats plant in Colorado was the only US site that built plutonium triggers for nuclear bombs: chunks of radioactive metal about the size of a softball.

In her superb memoir, Full Body Burden, Iversen interweaves her own compelling autobiography with a history of Rocky Flats. Her prose combines perceptive lyricism and stark brutality.

Iversen struggled with an alcoholic father and a mother in denial, and found solace riding horses far out into the Colorado wilds. She paid little attention to Rocky Flats until she took a job there, typing up reports of accidents euphemistically described as "incidents".

This prompted her to investigate further. She uncovered a catalogue of institutional neglect and a management system that cared little for workers or the environment. Enormous amounts of plutonium were lost, and wound up contaminating the surrounding area, including the water supply. Epidemiological studies showed rocketing cancer levels. Many of Iversen's friends and neighbours died young.

Ultimately, it is a book about the dangers of keeping secrets. Iversen's family broke apart because they kept secrets from their neighbours, from each other and even from themselves. Meanwhile, Rocky Flats itself was only able to do so much damage because its activities were kept secret, even from the people whose world it was poisoning.

Book Information
Full Body Burden
by Kristen Iversen
Published by: Harvill Secker/Crown
?14.99/$25

On the origin of evolution

Jonathon Keats, contributor

WHEN Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, he probably did not expect to be taken to task for plagiarising Aristotle. Yet the ancient philosopher was just one of several dozen men who Darwin was compelled to credit with anticipating evolution as his ideas spread and his originality was questioned.

As Rebecca Stott shows in Darwin's Ghosts, he partly brought it on himself. Having outlined a "historical sketch" of scientific forebears, Darwin put off publishing it with the first edition for fear it would be incomplete. Accused of intellectual plagiarism, he overcompensated, appending to later editions an ever-expanding foreword that included such unlikely authorities as Patrick Matthew, author of On Naval Timber and Arboriculture. If anything, Darwin's thoroughness further obscured the lineage of his ideas. Stott provides the lucid intellectual genealogy of evolution that the great man could not.

She begins by rescuing Darwin from his own deference. Darwin added Aristotle to his preface after receiving an extract from Aristotle's On the Parts of Animals translated by a clerk named Clair James Grece. According to Grece, the excerpt proved that Aristotle foresaw the mutability of species back in the 4th century BC, a claim Darwin accepted since he didn't read Greek. While written by Aristotle, the excerpt is in fact an exercise in ridicule: seeking to supplant poetic fancy with empirical observation, Aristotle paraphrases the poet Empedocles, who held the weird notion that species evolved by random redistribution of their organs.

But Stott also discusses proto-evolutionists unknown to Darwin and his detractors. The earliest was the 9th-century Muslim scholar Al-Jahiz, whose observations of insect communities led him to see life as a web in which only the fittest survived. Stott convincingly argues, though, that Al-Jahiz's web of life was intended to show the perfection of God's design. Like Aristotle, Al-Jahiz was an excellent naturalist, and noticed some of the phenomena that would lead Darwin to his grand conclusions, but he was not asking Darwinian questions.

As Stott puts it, "the history of evolution ultimately testifies to the fertility of nature and its production not only of a variety of forms... but also of a variety of ideas." Against this variegated backdrop, Darwin's theory emerges in its full originality.

Book Information
Darwin's Ghosts
by Rebecca Stott
Published by: Bloomsbury/Spiegel & Grau
?25/$27

Animal disease, human cure

David Cohen, contributor

WE ARE animals. Like it or not, we have more in common with our four-legged, furry, amphibian and feathered friends than most of us realise. That we share 70 per cent of our DNA with a sea sponge, let alone around 95 per cent of it with a chimpanzee, is now well known. How does this genetic similarity translate into everyday life? When it comes to health and healthy behaviour, we share much more with other species than you might think. Cougars get cancer, promiscuous koalas get the clap, and wallabies get high on opium. Cardiologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and science writer Kathryn Bowers have researched similarities between human and animal sickness, drawing unexpected conclusions.

The authors argue that human medicine - far from being superior to veterinary medicine, as tradition dictates - could advance in leaps and bounds by learning from discoveries in animal disease research. They are not talking about traditional animal research: infecting healthy animals and studying their response. Rather, they argue that as we all share common ancestors, diseases that arise in one species are likely to resemble those in another, or even be the same. Treat one and you may be able to treat the other with comparable techniques.

In support of this thesis, the authors demonstrate how animals are ill in remarkably similar ways to people. Common diseases include cancer, heart disease, obesity, bulimia nervosa and even drug addiction. They make a convincing case, pointing out that some researchers have even organised a few conferences attended by both vets and medics to tentatively build bridges and explore the pan-species approach.

At times, the book becomes list-like, with several paragraphs describing all the different species that suffer from the same health problems as humans. But skip these and you will find the argument hard to resist. Plus you will have some killer dinner party gems. Who could resist the story of lemurs with erectile dysfunction, or the iguanas that ejaculate prematurely?

Book Information
Zoobiquity: What animals can teach us about health and the science of healing
by Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers
Published by: Virgin Books/Knopf
?12.99/$26.95

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