MORE  REVIEWS OF  SCIENCE  BOOKS

Germ Warfare: Breakthroughs in Immunology

By Alan G. Baxter, Allen & Unwin, 220pp

Scientists are nerds, four-eyed wimps without a life. Somehow, the creepy sneaks managed to get their hands on dangerous powers. They built the atomic bomb, and now they plan to unleash gene horrors on us.

            Does anyone still believe this? Immunogeneticist Alan Baxter trades on that travesty in his mix of pop science and oral history. Obviously Dr Baxter doesn't go along with such silliness--at 37, he's a scientist himself, head of the Autoimmunity Group at Sydney's Centenary Institute. Clearly his publishers reckon the image still has currency, since his book promises to "explode the myth of scientists as being stooped, stammering savants".

            To the extent he conveys an idea of the real science these "colourful characters" pursue, he's up against it, even when he kicks off with that blood-curdling horror, Ebola virus. Most immunology--the science of our natural defences against disease--is as riveting as double-entry book-keeping. It takes a poetic genius like the late Lewis Thomas, or the brilliantly readable Jim Schnabel, to make it sing. Even just describing how the immune system works, as Baxter notes, defeats most journalists.

            When Australian Peter Doherty shared the 1996 Nobel Medicine Prize for his work with Rolf Zinkernagel on T cells and the Major Histocompatibility Complex, or MHC (I can sense your eyes glazing over), local papers went wild with front page stories. None of them, Baxter complains, tried to describe what the scientists "had actually done". It's a fair cop, so I looked forward to his own treatment of Doherty's work. It proved numbingly unreadable, like an annotated stock-list. Here's a sample:

            "By chance, the mouse strain that they had used to establish their killer T cell assay was CBA, which, like C3H, was originally derived at the Jackson Laboratory from the C-strain of mice. The most important similarity between these strains was that they shared the same MHC, or H2 genes, unlike any of the available strains. They soon discovered that the only strains that were able to generate killer T cells capable of killing the L929 cells expressing the H2^k version of MHC were those that also expressed H2^k--CBA and C3H."

            To some extent, this jargon is unavoidable. It doesn't prove scientists are boring nerds, just that each corner of the world has its own strange lingo. Try explaining cricket to an American. Science is built from its excruciating distinctions between things most of us have never heard of. Even so, superb popular writers like Paul Davies can make remote and difficult topics like physics and cosmology palatable.

            One way is, indeed, to tell the story through anecdotes about the "colourful characters" who cavort with their in-bred mice and radioactive tracers, competing madly for prizes and reputation. Baxter gives thumbnail portraits of experts and villains from a century of attempts to understand how our bodies defeat infection and sometimes go crazy and bite themselves by mistake. There's "emotionally labile, highly strung" Russian Elie Metchnikoff, founder of the science: "violent and passionate", something of a hypochondriac, he came good in mid-life with his discovery of phagocytes, the defensive cells that eat germs. George Snell bred cancer resistant mice for eight fiddly years, and watched them all die when his lab burned down. Then he went back and did it all over from the start.

            Despite an abundance of Europeans and Americans, immunology is a surprisingly Australian success story, with Nobel Prizes to shy Howard Florey (antibacterials), slow but penetrating Macfarlane Burnet (the clonal theory of antibodies), and iconoclastic Peter Doherty (immunological surveillance). Others are big players: Sir Gus Nossal, Ian Mackay and Jacques Miller, all at Melbourne's famous Walter and Eliza Hall Institute; boisterous Kevin Lafferty whose work was clouded unfairly by an American scandal. These are genuinely fascinating people, and their work has contributed to human happiness. Baxter's mini-biographies manage to catch some aspect of each man (and a couple of women), even if his treatment of their science is a bitter pill to swallow.

Almost Like A Whale: The Origin of Species Updated

By Steve Jones, Doubleday/Transworld, 402pp

Ever wonder how you'd have lived in the 200th century BC? In 20,000 BC, life was a bit uncertain, made easier by some nice technology: fire, woven fabrics, chipped stone tools, wooden weapons. Yet there were just a few tens of thousands of people on the whole planet.

            You didn't get sick very often. Your clan was too small to support the raging epidemics that eventually would fell whole nations. In fact, those organisms probably hadn't infested humans yet. Farming and herding, not many millennia back, let the little brutes jump from swine, cattle and chickens into human bloodstreams, mutating there into awesome killers, then settling into an uneasy stand-off. So you'd have lived reasonably well, thin and muscular with good teeth (but eyesight fading with age), singing your history, dancing your skills and places, rejoicing in your kids, the old dying in a sacred haze. We humans evolved to thrive in that way of life, give or take the odd climatic cataclysm, the occasional megafauna torched or hunted to extinction.

            That's also what life was like in the 190th century BC, and the 100th, and it hadn't changed much by 5000 BC. Yet now, with immense speed, we're about to rewrite the deep codings of evolution and ecology. As we prepare in earnest, it pays to know just what those rules are. Geneticist Steve Jones' revision of Charles Darwin's ground-breaking classic On The Origin of Species is a fine place to start.

            Here's the scary thing: almost everything in this entertaining volume is news, and not just by the standards of the 200th century BC. Jones carefully retains the structure of Darwin's own elaborate evolutionary solution to species diversity: puny inherited variations in bodies and behaviour, many more offspring born than can survive amid limited resources, hence `natural selection' of individuals best suited to their circumstances who pass down those same winning traits, with further random modifications. Brilliant, but Darwin (who wrote, after all, in the mid-19th century) missed a few tricks. He didn't know about genetics, for a start. He made some cluey but wrong guesses. Luckily, his key insight remains powerful and valid, once mathematical and molecular genetics fill in the blank spots.

            The most extraordinary thing is how shockingly new all this knowledge is. People of the 200th and 100th centuries BC shared essentially the same reality. Yet I can vividly remember the stunned elation I felt, mere decades ago, when a pal showed me an article in the glossy American magazine Life with simplified diagrams of the DNA molecule, its helix curling open as its code was explored for the very first time. DNA's secret mechanism had been unlocked to specialists just nine years earlier. Today, not yet half a century after Watson and Crick broke the code, the first sequencing of a complete human genome has been achieved years ahead of schedule. Free on the World Wide Web, it will be available to anyone around the world with a cheap computer and a phone line. Nor does it now take a decade for explanations to reach the public. Here it is. Eat it before it goes stale.

            If it's all news to you, settle back for the ride of your life. Even if you think you've heard it all before, hang on tight. Jones is a mordant foe of Richard Dawkins-style `ultra-darwinism', which puts the selfish gene at the heart of evolution and seeks Darwinian explanations for mind and culture. Jones likes to offend fashion: `Karl Marx got it (as usual) more or less right.' Even so, he's uncompromising about evolution's mindless pain. To Darwin, he notes, `evolution had no commonwealth: self-interest is what matters. He was right. There is no charity in nature.' These views are not inconsistent. They oblige us to act as humans, with foresight and conscience, not just as gene composites thrashing wildly for reproductive superiority.

            Just as well, perhaps. Hermaphrodite slugs, say, have a tough time, since neither wants to be lumbered with the kids, leading to each courting partner `trying to bite off the other's penis.' There's kinkiness rampant in Darwin's garden. Sexual opportunists among male bluegill sunfish `begin to resemble females, until they can saunter unafraid on to a territory, the sole risk one of courtship by its besotted holder. When a real female appears a transvestite's deception pays off. He fertilizes her eggs and makes a hurried exit.'

            The sensitive cross-dressing fish has an eerily contemporary ring to it. With the new genomics we humans might find it easy literally to change sex. If so, being a human really will be extravagantly different in the 21st century, as we finally leap free of Darwin's fishing net.

As Nature Made Him: The Boy W ho Was Raised as a Girl

By John Colapinto, HarperCollins, 281pp

Is it a boy or a girl? That's the first question asked when the baby's born (or after the first echo-scans). Thirty years ago, enraged thugs screamed it at any long-haired youth. A couple of decades later, they howled it at shaven-headed girls instead. Today, allegedly, desire makes no crass distinction between male and female bodies, and cultural theory insists that gender is a social construction, ultimately a choice. Gender bending went from pop shock to cool custom. Still, while we're now in an era of fluidity and choice, sex and gender remain a source of endless fascination and anxiety.

            Is sex really so adaptable, a fashion statement or an ideological option? For decades we were told it's upbringing and preference, and one of the strongest arguments against biology's dominion was the case of `John/Joan'. A twin boy, Bruce Reimer, lost his penis at seven months during a botched circumcision in 1966, was then castrated, surgically sex-reassigned and raised as Brenda.

            For years, his/her Johns Hopkins University sponsor, Dr John Money, claimed the case as a triumph of adaptation, snails and puppy dog tails gracefully morphed into sugar and spice. It grew into the classic instance cited endlessly in feminist and poststructural `social construction' texts and courses.

            In fact, as we learned a few years ago, the poor kid was a psychological mess, rough and tomboyish to a fault, even standing to urinate, and finally came out in adolescence as a male. He's changed his name to David, a memento of his battle with Money, had painful and somewhat successful phalloplasty to create a working penis, toils with the other blokes in a slaughterhouse, and is now married, with adopted kids. John Colapinto's fascinating, heartbreaking (but rhetorically loaded) book makes David Reimer's painful journey a parable of ideology and ambition over caring common sense.

            The argument urged by Colapinto might seem obvious, given what any farmer or pet-owner knows. Castrate a young animal, and it grows up lacking some of the traits that otherwise kick into action at maturity--but it doesn't change sex. In the uterus and then during infancy, the brain starts down specialised male or female developmental cascades. Once launched, nurture can't re-set all the implicit behavioral templates, or many of the physiological ones, even in the absence of testicles or ovaries.

            The motive for surgically sex-reassigning babies born with ambiguous or damaged genitalia was surely kindly, if misguided. These kids, it was thought, would be tormented by their peers, grow up with damaged self-esteem, and probably become psychotic or self-destructive. Yet one of the truly astonishing aspects of Colapinto's book is that it reveals, apparently for the first time in this long debate, that Money's own unpublished 1950s PhD thesis provided survey evidence that non-`corrected' individuals didn't suffer unduly during maturation, and certainly didn't go mad.

            His cover-up of David's key case is shocking and disgraceful, of course, but I find it piquant that this sort of thing happens on all sides of such questions. Last time round, it was Sir Cyril Burt concocting IQ results to `prove' the superior impact of heredity over nurture. The last 50 or 60 years has witnessed a slow gavotte in psychological fashion, aligned with crude and hideously cruel geopolitical struggles. Nazis taught that all was blood, killing millions in that cause. Communists claimed all was learned culture, and killed those polluted by wrong opinions. Racism and more recently sexism were countered in the West by nurturists, making alternative models appear the ideology of bigots. For a decade, this consensus has crumbled under the impact of new science and evolutionary insight. It's a turbulent epoch, and David Reimer's tale is a distressing parable of our uncertainties, compulsive reading.

            Colapinto's book is not without its own skews, demonising Money to an extraordinary extent, not allowing him the benefit of a good conscience (however misguided, and admittedly that PhD makes it hard to be generous). He is subtly and repeatedly held up to ridicule and revulsion for being too clever and articulate, for his uncensored speech even in front of children, his own bisexual preferences, the way he showed child patients `pornography', pictures of naked adults and children, and made them explore each other's bodies. There's a strong implication that we're meant to suspect Dr Money of paedophilia as well as his other crimes. This is a rather curious spin from a reporter who published his original 1997 story on the case in Rolling Stone, not Reader's Digest.

            Money's case is almost certainly wrong, based on misleading evidence from intersex people whose brains were likely cross-wired during foetal development. But what of those many people who choose to switch later in life, after years of heterosexuality? Must they always have been pre-wired to make the move? This is perhaps as dangerous a preconception as the purely socially constructed version. Queer theorists are surely right that we, or some of us, can choose either to expand or specialise our sexual desires, at least to some extent.

            Still, this says nothing about changing sex entirely, as was imposed on Bruce/Brenda. Sex reassignment of infants by surgery will probably be seen some day in the same light as cultural clitoridectomy: as mutilation. A few weeks ago, urologist and child psychologist Dr William Reiner, also at Johns Hopkins, announced that despite hormone treatment and surgery, 25 baby boys born with no penis but normal testicles (like David), then castrated and raised as girls, all retained `strong male characteristics' and most switched back to male. We are male or female because our brains are our key sex organs, and those squishy parts become set in their ways long before our more visible genitalia allow happy parents to cry: `It's a girl!'