BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE AND NATURE WRITING 2001

by Lee Edson

In his introduction to Houghton Mifflin's 2001 edition of the Best American Science and Nature Writing, Harvard Professor Edward O. Wilson, the eminent naturalist and author, outlines the dilemma faced by the modern science writer. The science writer, according to Wilson, has the uncomfortable task of balancing the artifices of literature, such as metaphor, which may be no more than a pretty lie, with the scientific demands for straightforward, unvarnished fact and truth telling.

To resolve this dilemma Wilson notes that the good science writer first converts his facts into narrative, often using scientists as protagonists who overcome some physical or intellectual challenge. The best writing tells a story with the flair of literature but without the betrayal of nature. Its target, if the writer wishes to capture the public interest, is entertainment, the gateway presumably-through Wilson doesn't say so-to understanding.

With such a rigid standard as a measuring rod one would think it might be difficult, perhaps even impossible, to find enough live examples in one year to fill a book. But Wilson and his series coeditor Burkhard Bilger, of Discover, manage to come up with 22 interesting articles, a distillate from hundreds of choices, Bilger tells us, that do seem to fit some of the Wilsonian parameters.

The best writing tells a story with the flair of literature but without the betrayal of nature.

The opening story, for instance, an essay on the algorithm, is a mix of metaphor and reality that creates a sensory fresco that is pleasing to the literary eye and ear and at the same time highly informative. Ingeniously entitled "Iterations of Immortality," the story sings the praises of the algorithm, the early Arab-invented mathematical tool which to most of us represent simply the codified rules of the game, a recipe, or a program for a computer.

In the hands of the author, however, the algorithm is lifted into regal status as the crowned new mathematical ruler of the new world. The author tells us unabashedly that it is the second great concept of the West-the first being calculus (and there being no third). He then goes on to notice its presence everywhere in our culture and to envelop it with the same love, passion, and enduring significance that Keats showed on a Grecian urn, ending up with the subliminal thought that in the algorithm we are looking at the handbook of God. Only a computernik could have become so spiritually enraptured with this mathematical instrument.

The algorithm story is adapted from a book on algorithms and it is included in Professor Wilson's winner's circle, I suspect, to introduce us to the extraordinarily colorful and cunning uses of the written word. The rest of the book is, in large measure, just a literate and highbrow wandering through a pride of nature and science writing with nature, as one might expect from an editor who is a naturalist, dominating in 14 of the 21 stories that follow.

These stories range from trips into the jungle in the search for elusive species to the conventional musing in the woods or lamenting, as did Jane Goodall in the forest of Gombe following the death of her husband. They also include a masterpiece of ecologic imagery in "Ice Station Vostok," a Russian antarctic outpost of research, along with stories that I like to describe as science in nature, typified by "The Wild Animals Scotland Yard," a fascinating piece in which the author demonstrates how DNA forensic matching becomes a method for rebuilding the dinosaurs and other species of the past.

The Darwinian side of nature-the bloody-tooth-and-claw stories familiar to PBS viewers-are represented, but only minimally, in an encounter with a crocodile, the dawn killing of an elk calf by a wolf, the predatory behavior of the harpy eagle, and life and death struggles such as saving a watering hole in the face of commercial development.

The biggest plays in the book, in terms of story length, are not really examples of science writing at all but essentially semi-philosophic, semi-political, semi-business takeoffs on well-covered science-related subjects of the times. "The Recycled Generation," for instance, is a presentation of the stem-cell brouhaha in human terms, which unfortunately just missed the closure, albeit temporary, that President Bush brought to it with his compromise on banning certain fetal-cell lines in research but accepting others. The piece is long on description of 24-year-olds stabbing cow eggs with hypodermics and short on the scientific thinking behind the operation and the importance of stem cells as the evolutionary engine for creating diversity of function in the organism.

Scientists may read it out of curiosity and certainly journalists in search of modelsÉif they can restrain their jealousy.

Another piece, a nightmare of a story for these times, details the weapons of potential bioterrorism that represent the evil residue of some of our new technological and commercial developments. "In Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" the author, Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems, talks of the "great goo" threat using plant replication to choke us to death and adds nanotechnology and robotics to the usual suspects as 21st century agents of mass destruction. It is interesting to note that these stories arose out of the private sector, an area not usually represented in this light in collections of this sort.

A third story of the times-abortion and brain waves-adds argument allegedly based on science (at least the author says so) to both pro-life and pro-choice. The author claims that "science has shown" (sic) that life does not occur at conception and that the early periods of gestation are essentially chemical, but it is the third trimester that actually begins brain activity and the creation of human form. While the author tries to tie recent science into the controversy it still remains rooted in religion, and the science is not likely to persuade either side of the debate to alter its position.

Finally, in what I regard as a somewhat seedy story of current science and business, author Robert Preston details the battle between entrepreneur Craig Venter, of Celera Genomics, and Jim Watson and the NIH over patenting genes and selling of new information on the human genome for corporate profit. This is basically a story of politics, business machination, and stock manipulation rather than of science, and in this critic's view, is a surprising entry in this series.

The closing story of the book is once again a sure winner in the nature-writing group-a personal-experience narrative of a trip to photograph the inside of a volcano. Once again, good literature, fine adventure, but for aficionados, limited in science.

Throughout the book, Professor Wilson shows that he can cast his net far and wide using stories not only from such traditionally mined sources as the New Yorker and the New York Times magazine, but also from outlets less familiar, such as the Utne Reader, Orion, Outside, and Wired. The authors of the articles also form a surprisingly disparate group, half being scientists with a flair for writing and the others ranging from professional reporters to amateur writers manque. Only one of the authors is a member of NASW: freelance Cynthia Mills, a veterinarian-turned-writer for her story "Breeding Discontent" published in The Sciences. Mill's thoughtful philosophic piece on captive breeding observes that in the urge to preserve vanishing wild species we are likely to breed the wildness out of them. This exotic branch of biology science, in effect, may sow the seeds of its own failure.

Who is the audience for this best of show smorgasbord in American science writing? Allegedly, it is the public, but hardly in the Oprah Winfrey sense. Scientists may read it out of curiosity and certainly journalists in search of models will read it, too, if they can restrain their jealousy. But who really needs pre-selection in science reading? Is there a larger audience that will read these articles because Professor Wilson says they are good? The marketers at Houghton Mifflin think there is and they point to the proof in the rise of a bull market for annual anthologies of which they claim to have 500,000 in print. They have even trademarked the name "Best American."

For those independents among us who don't like to be given freedom from choice or have other standards or miss pieces in theoretical physics and astronomy the editors kindly list an appendix of also-rans. In this day of instant computer publishing any reader with a PC has the power to put together his own list of the best of everything.

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Lee Edson is a freelance based in Stamford, Conn.