Meaty and entertaining, with the effort extended well worth the energy.
A foray into the developmental biology of individual cells in an embryo.
While Zernicka-Goetz (Biology and Bioengineering/Caltech) and co-author Highfield (The Science of Harry Potter: How Magic Really Works, 2002, etc.) discuss how the cells of early embryos arise, how they organize with such precision and direct their own development, and how they sense when something goes wrong, this is not a primer on embryology but rather an in-depth journey through the world of the research embryologist. Following the biology takes patience and focus for those not well versed in the science—“the mitochondrially targeted zinc-finger nuclease, or mitochondria-targeted transcription activator-like effector nucleases, enzymes that can be engineered to snip specific sequences of DNA, are used to recognize and then eliminate mutant mitochondrial DNA”—but the effort is repaid in spades. Readers engage with the whole process of fertilization as well as cellular specialization, cell cleavage, two-cell biases, and the developmental process. In her research, Zernicka-Goetz makes movies of fluorescently labeled cells “because they talk to each other with proteins and other molecular factors and respond to their surroundings.” We learn that cooperation allows specialization and promotes diversity, spurring the embryo to self-organize. We follow the “dance” as the embryo becomes a multilayered organism. There are also intriguing discussions of how a blastocyst’s three types of cells arise and how they interact to make something as complex as the human body. The story has a memoirlike atmosphere, especially when Zernicka-Goetz turns to episodes of her life. But she is never far from the science, as when she writes about her pregnancy and her son, who had chromosome irregularities, which became a topic of her research. Particularly beguiling is a chapter devoted to advances in creative biology—regenerative medicine, preimplantation testing, designer babies, embryo editing, genome editing—and all the attendant ethical concerns that surround them.
Meaty and entertaining, with the effort extended well worth the energy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5416-9906-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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