All Conclusions in Science Are Open to Further Inquiry

(p. C3) Victory is often temporary. In December 2014, a nurse named Nina Pham contracted Ebola from a patient in Dallas. She was transferred to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., and treated by a team led by Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

When Ms. Pham was discharged, the cameras captured an indelible moment: Together with NIH Director Francis Collins, Dr. Fauci, dressed in a crisp white lab coat, walked her out with his arm draped over her shoulder. This conveyed a critical message at a time when public fear about the disease was widespread. “We would not be releasing Ms. Pham if we were not completely confident in the knowledge that she has fully recovered, is virus free and poses no public health threat,” an NIH statement read.

But scientific certainty often carries an asterisk. Six months later, doctors in Atlanta discovered that in some patients who survive, the Ebola virus could still be found hidden away in parts of the body. This did not indicate that they could transmit the disease, but it meant that they could no longer be declared “virus-free” with certainty. This episode demonstrated how quickly our knowledge about public health threats can alter. What we once thought was true for the Ebola virus had changed, and no doubt will continue to evolve.

For the full commentary, see:

Jeremy Brown. “What Past Crises Tell Us About the Coronavirus.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Feb. 1, 2020 [sic]): C3.

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated Jan. 31, 2020 [sic], and has the same title as the print version. In both the online and print versions, the first sentence quoted above is in bold font.)

Firms Develop Technology to Capture, Liquify, Transport, and Sequester CO2 into “Depleted Offshore Oil-and-Gas Wells”

(p. B4) ATHENS—Ship operators have a radical idea for industrial companies that are searching for ways to dispose of carbon emissions: Take the captured CO2 out to sea and bury it deep under the ocean floor.

But first, supercool the carbon emissions to temperatures so low that they become a liquid.

HD Hyundai Heavy Industries, the world’s largest shipyard, and Greece-based shipowner Capital Product Partners have designed a specialized vessel to carry liquefied CO2. They envision such ships transporting their cargo to depleted offshore oil-and-gas wells, where it would be pumped in and entombed for permanent storage. Capital Product Partners signed a deal for four such ships, to be delivered in 2025 and 2026, that together cost more than $300 million.

“Ships move everything from oil to our furniture, clothes and toothpaste. Now they’ll move our emissions, which is in effect waste management,” said Jerry Kalogiratos, chief executive of U.S.-listed Capital Product Partners, which operates more than 100 cargo vessels.

. . .

“The wells are sealed with a fast drying mix of concrete and sand. If there is a leak inland the gas could end up back in the atmosphere, but there is no conclusive research about what will happen if it escapes in the water,” said Fotis Pagoulatos, a naval engineer in Athens. “The consensus for now is that pollution risk at sea from leaked CO2 is low.”

. . .

While no contracts have been signed, Kalogiratos said Capital Product Partners is in talks with a number of European emitters as well as big energy companies in Japan and South Korea.

For the full story, see:

Costas Paris. “Ship Operators Offer to Bury Emissions.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, February 1, 2024): B4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date January 31, 2024, and has the title “A New Solution for CO2 Emissions: Bury Them at Sea.” The online version of the article says that the title of the print version is “Ship Operators Offer to Bury Emissions” but my copy of the print version has the title “Ship Operators Offer to Bury Emissions at Sea.”)

“Linguistic Diversity Is Precious” Because Languages Are “Natural Experiments” in “Ways of Seeing, Understanding, and Living”

(p. A13) Linguistic variety is “often seen as a problem, the curse of Babel,” but for a linguist, New York City is a riotous collection of living specimens—a “greenhouse, not a graveyard.”  . . .  Mr. Perlin, who has a doctorate in linguistics, helps run the Endangered Language Alliance, which works to document such minority tongues.  . . .

The heart of “Language City” is portraits of individual New York-based speakers. Mr. Perlin writes about their work as well as his, capturing the grind of immigrant life with empathy, balance and wit.  (. . .)  “If the country was rich we would never leave,” says Husniya, a Wakhi speaker from bleak post-Soviet Tajikistan. But she savors the city’s entrepreneurial energy: “New York opened my eyes. It shapes you to be a human being, not dividing based on religion, face, or race, or anything.”

. . .

Wonderfully rich, “Language City” is in part an introduction to the diverse ways different languages work. Seke and other “evidential” languages, for example, have different grammatical forms to indicate how the speaker knows what she’s asserting—whether from observation or inference, hearsay or hunch. Other languages syntactically “tag the speaker’s surprise at unexpected information” or have a special temporal marking “just for things happening today.”

. . .

Yet linguistic diversity is precious, Mr. Perlin stresses, and should be celebrated, not just tolerated.  . . .  . . ., languages “represent thousands of natural experiments” that encode wildly different “ways of seeing, understanding, and living.” Constructed by generations of collective effort, they are invisible cathedrals bigger and more democratic than any building.

For the full review see:

Timothy Farrington. “BOOKSHELF; The Words On the Street.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, Feb. 23, 2024): A13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date February 22, 2024, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Language City’ Review: The Words on the Street.”)

The book under review is:

Perlin, Ross. Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York. Washington, D.C.: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2024.

“Adoption of Singular ‘Gold Standard’ Models” Closes “Off Other Important Avenues of Inquiry”

(p. A15) Ubiquitous and persuasive, models . . . drive decisions—one reason why, in Ms. Thompson’s view, they require our urgent attention. She tells us that, as a graduate student studying North Atlantic storms, she noticed how different models predicted different overall effects and produced contradictory results.

. . .

The problem is that Model Land is easy to enter but difficult to escape. Having built “a beautiful internally consistent model,” Ms. Thompson writes, it can be “emotionally difficult to acknowledge that the initial assumptions on which the whole thing is built are literally not true.”

There are all sorts of ways that models can lead us astray. A small measurement error on an input can lead to wildly inaccurate forecasts—a phenomenon known as the Butterfly Effect. Fortunately, this type of uncertainty is often manageable. Far more problematic are what Ms. Thompson calls “unquantifiable unknowns”—things that are left out of a model’s calculation because they can’t be anticipated, such as the unexpected arrival of a transformative technology or the abrupt collapse of a robust market. It is not always true, she observes, that the data we have now will be relevant to the future—as traders discovered in the stock-market crash of 1987, when their models catastrophically failed.

. . .  We may be inclined to regard models as objective expressions of truth, yet they are deliberately constructed interpretations, imbued with the values and viewpoints of the modelers—primarily, as Ms. Thompson notes, well-educated, middle-class individuals. During the pandemic, models “took more account of harms to some groups of people than others,” resulting in a “moral case” for lockdowns that was “partial and biased.” Modelers who worked from home—while others maintained the supply chain—often overlooked “all of the possible harms” of the actions their models were suggesting.  . . .

The promise and peril of models, Ms. Thompson recognizes, has deep resonance in biomedicine, where so-called model organisms, like yeast and zebrafish, have led to foundational insights and accelerated the development of therapeutics. At the same time, treatments that work brilliantly in Model Land often fail in people, devastating patients and disappointing drug developers. The search for improved disease models can be complicated when proponents of one model suppress research into alternative approaches, as the late journalist Sharon Begley documented in a powerful 2019 report. Ms. Thompson perceptively critiques the adoption of singular “gold standard” models, noting that the “solidification” of one set of assumptions can lock us into one way of thinking and close off other important avenues of inquiry.

For the full review see:

David A. Shaywitz. “BOOKSHELF; Seduced By Numbers.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, Dec. 28, 2022): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date December 27, 2022, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Escape From Model Land’ Review: Seduced by Numbers.”)

The book under review is:

Thompson, Erica. Escape from Model Land: How Mathematical Models Can Lead Us Astray and What We Can Do About It. New York: Basic Books, 2022.

Sharon Begley’s “powerful” 2019 report, mentioned above, is:

Begley, Sharon. “The Maddening Saga of How an Alzheimer’s ‘Cabal’ Thwarted Progress toward a Cure for Decades.” STAT; Reporting from the Frontiers of Health and Medicine, Posted June 25, 2019. Available from https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/25/alzheimers-cabal-thwarted-progress-toward-cure/.

Cleaning Pigeon Poop Off Their Antenna to Rule Out a Cause of Static

(p. B11) Arno A. Penzias, whose astronomical probes yielded incontrovertible evidence of a dynamic, evolving universe with a clear point of origin, confirming what became known as the Big Bang theory, died on Monday [January 22, 2024] in San Francisco.

. . .

In 1964, while preparing the antenna to measure the properties of the Milky Way galaxy, Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson, another young radio astronomer who was new to Bell Labs, encountered a persistent, unexplained hiss of radio waves that seemed to come from everywhere in the sky, detected no matter which way the antenna was pointed. Perplexed, they considered various sources of the noise. They thought they might be picking up radar, or noise from New York City, or radiation from a nuclear explosion. Or might pigeon droppings be the culprit?

Examining the antenna, Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson “subjected its electric circuits to scrutiny comparable to that used in preparing a manned spacecraft,” Walter Sullivan wrote in The New York Times in 1965. Yet the mysterious hiss remained.

The cosmological underpinnings of the noise were finally explained with help from physicists at Princeton University, who had predicted that there might be radiation coming from all directions left over from the Big Bang. The buzzing, it turned out, was just that: a cosmic echo. It confirmed that the universe wasn’t infinitely old and static but rather had begun as a primordial fireball that left the universe bathed in background radiation.

. . .

. . . Dr. Penzias’s path to stumbling onto the answer to one of humanity’s most central questions started . . ., when he joined Bell Laboratories as a member of its radio research group in Holmdel.

There, he saw the potential of AT&T’s new satellite communications antenna, a giant radio telescope known as the Holmdel Horn, as a tool for cosmological observation. In teaming up with Dr. Wilson in 1964 to use the antenna, Dr. Wilson said in a recent interview, one of their goals was to advance the nascent field of radio astronomy by accurately measuring several bright celestial sources.

Soon after they started their measurements, however, they heard the hiss. They spent months ruling out possible causes, including pigeons.

“The pigeons would go and roost at the small end of the horn, and they deposited what Arno called a white dielectric material,” Dr. Wilson said. “And we didn’t know if the pigeon poop might have produced some radiation.” So the men climbed up and cleaned it out. The noise persisted.

It was finally Dr. Penzias’s fondness for chatting on the telephone that led to a fortuitous breakthrough. (“It was a good thing he worked for the phone company, because he liked to use their instrument,” Dr. Wilson said. “He talked to a lot of people.”)

In January 1965, Dr. Penzias dialed Bernard Burke, a fellow radio astronomer, and in the course of their conversation he mentioned the puzzling hiss. Dr. Burke suggested that Dr. Penzias call a physicist at Princeton who had been trying to prove that the Big Bang had left traces of cosmological radiation. He did.

Intrigued, scientists from Princeton visited Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson, and together they made the connection to the Big Bang. Theory and observation were then brought together in a pair of papers published in 1965.

For the full obituary, see:

Katie Hafner. “Arno A. Penzias Is Dead at 90; Confirmed the Big Bang Theory.” The New York Times (Thursday, January 25, 2024): B11.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Jan. 22, 2024, and has the title “Arno A. Penzias, 90, Dies; Nobel Physicist Confirmed Big Bang Theory.”)

Biologists Surprised That Marine Animals Are “Having a Blast” in “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”

(p. A3) Biologists who fished toothbrushes, rope and broken bottle shards from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch found them studded with gooseneck barnacles and jet-black sea anemones glistening like buttons. All told, they found 484 marine invertebrates from 46 species clinging to the detritus, they reported Monday [April 17, 2023] in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

. . .

Marine ecologists said they would expect most coastal species to struggle to survive outside their shoreline habitats. On the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, animals were found growing and reproducing.

“They’re having a blast,” said study author Matthias Egger, head of environmental and social affairs at the Dutch nonprofit The Ocean Cleanup. “That’s really a shift in the scientific understanding.”

Anemones like to protect themselves with grains of sand, Dr. Egger said, but out in the garbage patch they are covered in seed-like microplastics. Squeeze an anemone and the shards spew out, he said: “They’re all fully loaded with plastic on the outside and inside.”

. . .

The patch is also a haven for animals that are at home on the open ocean. Such species—sea snails, blue button jellyfish, and a relative called by-the-wind sailors—gather more densely where there is more plastic, Dr. Helm and her team said in a study posted online ahead of peer-review.

Removing the plastic would mean uprooting them, Dr. Helm said: “Cleaning it up is not actually that simple.”

For the full story, see:

Nidhi Subbaraman. “Ocean Garbage Patch Hosts Critters.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Apr. 18, 2023): A3.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated April 17, 2023, and has the title “Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch Is Bursting With Life.” The 7th, 8th, and 9th sentences quoted above, appear in the online, but not in the print, version of the commentary. Also, the online version of the sentence on being able to handle switching, contains seven added words of detail.)

The published version of the “posted online” article mentioned above is:

Haram, Linsey E., James T. Carlton, Luca Centurioni, Henry Choong, Brendan Cornwell, Mary Crowley, Matthias Egger, Jan Hafner, Verena Hormann, Laurent Lebreton, Nikolai Maximenko, Megan McCuller, Cathryn Murray, Jenny Par, Andrey Shcherbina, Cynthia Wright, and Gregory M. Ruiz. “Extent and Reproduction of Coastal Species on Plastic Debris in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre.” Nature Ecology & Evolution 7, no. 5 (April 17, 2023): 687-97.

“Serendipitous” Discoveries Related to Two “Odd-Looking” Animals Was Source of Weight-Loss Drugs

(p. A1) The blockbuster diabetes drugs that have revolutionized obesity treatment seem to have come out of nowhere, turning the diet industry upside down in just the past year. But they didn’t arrive suddenly. They are the unlikely result of two separate bodies of science that date back decades and began with the study of (p. A2) two unsightly creatures: a carnivorous fish and a poisonous lizard.

In 1980, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital wanted to use new technology to find the gene that encodes a hormone called glucagon. The team decided to study Anglerfish, which have special organs that make the hormone, simplifying the task of gathering samples of pure tissue.

. . .

After plucking out organs the size of Lima beans with scalpels, they dropped them into liquid nitrogen and drove back to Boston. Then they determined the genetic sequence of glucagon, which is how they learned that the same gene encodes related hormones known as peptides. One of them was a key discovery that would soon be found in humans, too.

It was called glucagon-like peptide-1 and its nickname was GLP-1.

After they found GLP-1, others would determine its significance. Scientists in Massachusetts and Europe learned that it encourages insulin release and lowers blood sugar. That held out hope that it could help treat diabetes. Later they discovered that GLP-1 makes people feel fuller faster and slows down emptying of food from the stomach.

. . .

The key to the first drug would come from a serendipitous discovery inside another odd-looking animal.

Around the time Goodman was cutting open fish, Jean-Pierre Raufman was studying insect and animal venoms to see if they stimulated digestive enzymes in mammals.

“We got a tremendous response from Gila monster venom,” he recalled.

It was a small discovery that could have been forgotten, but for a lucky break nearly a decade later when Raufman gave a lecture on that work at the Bronx Veterans Administration. John Eng, an expert in identifying peptides, was intrigued. The pair had collaborated on unrelated work a few years before. Eng proposed they study Gila monsters.

. . .

Eng isolated a small peptide that he called Exendin-4, which they found was similar to human GLP-1.

Eng then tested his new peptide on diabetic mice and found something intriguing: It not only reduced blood glucose, it did so for hours. If the same effect were to be observed in humans, it could be the key to turning GLP-1 into a meaningful advance in diabetes treatment, not just a seasickness simulator in an IV bag.

Jens Juul Holst, a pioneering GLP-1 researcher, remembers standing in an exhibit hall at a European conference next to Eng. The two had put up posters that displayed their work, hoping top researchers would stop by to discuss it. But other scientists were skeptical that anything derived from a lizard would work in humans.

“He was extremely frustrated,” recalled Holst. “Nobody was interested in his work. None of the important people. It was too strange for people to accept.”

After three years, tens of thousands of dollars in patent-related fees and thousands of miles traveled, Eng found himself standing with his poster in San Francisco. This time, he caught the attention of Andrew Young, an executive from a small pharmaceutical company named Amylin.

“I saw the results in the mice and realized this could be druggable,” Young said.

When an Eli Lilly executive leaned over his shoulder to look at Eng’s work, Young worried he might miss his chance. Not long after, Amylin licensed the patent.

They worked to develop Exendin-4 into a drug by synthesizing the Gila monster peptide. They weren’t sure what would happen in humans. “We couldn’t predict weight loss or weight gain with these drugs,” recalled Young. “They enhance insulin secretion. Usually that increases body weight.” But the effect on slowing the stomach’s processing of food was more pronounced and Young’s team found as they tested their new drug that it caused weight loss.

To get a better understanding of Exendin-4, Young consulted with Mark Seward, a dentist raising more than 100 Gila monsters in his Colorado Springs, Colo., basement. The lizard enthusiast’s task was to feed them and draw blood. One took exception to the needle in its tail, slipped its restraint and snapped its teeth on Seward’s palm—the only time he’s been bitten in the decades he’s raised the animals. “It’s like a wasp sting,” he said, “but much worse.”

Nine years after the chance San Francisco meeting between Eng and Young, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first GLP-1-based treatment in 2005.

The twice-daily injection remained in the bloodstream for hours, helping patients manage Type 2 diabetes. Eng would be paid royalties as high as $6.7 million per year for the drug, . . .

For the full story, see:

Rolfe Winkler and Ben Cohen. “Two Monsters Spawned Huge Drugs.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, June 24, 2023): A1-A2.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 23, 2023, and has the title “Monster Diet Drugs Like Ozempic Started With Actual Monsters.” The sentence about “a serendipitous discovery” appears in the online, but not the print, version of the article. The passages quoted above also include several other sentences that appear in the more extensive online version, but not in the print version.)

Global Warming Can Allow a “Sudden Efflorescence” of Adaptation from Dormant “Sleeping Beauties”

Above the title of the book review quoted below, the Wall Street Journal printed a few lines from a poem by Baudelaire:

Many a jewel of untold worth
Lies slumbering at the core of Earth
In darkness and oblivion drowned . . .
–Charles Baudelaire, “Le Guignon”

(p. C12) In his new book, Mr. [Andreas] Wagner, a professor at the Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Zurich, showcases biological “sleeping beauties”: animals, plants, even bacteria that for generations plugged along with modest evolutionary success, only to later flourish spectacularly. “Sleeping Beauties: The Mystery of Dormant Innovations in Nature and Culture” explains how evolutionary adaptations sometimes go from dormancy to full flowering, while also suggesting that an analogous process applies to human innovations, including science, technology and the arts.

. . .

First we need to recall that not every biological trait an organism possesses is optimal for its current environment. The swim bladder, for example, evolved in fish as an aid to adjusting buoyancy, only later becoming the basis for lungs when their descendants became terrestrial. And the human appendix currently appears to be more an evolutionary liability than an asset, although it may well have conveyed immunologic benefits in the past—and could even prove adaptive in the future. Certain traits may develop that are not immediately adaptive, in the sense of contributing directly to the reproductive success of the genes responsible for the trait and of the individuals carrying them.

If an organism develops a characteristic maladapted to its environment, it and the genes responsible for the trait are selected away into oblivion. But if the novelty is not particularly harmful, or even somewhat helpful, the trait may simply hang around through the generations—until a descendant organism finds a welcoming environmental niche.

The natural world is filled with solutions awaiting a problem.  . . .  But when environments change (and they always do), a wonderful and lively explosion can ensue.

Mr. Wagner refers to this sudden efflorescence as “adaptive radiation”—“only with a key innovation,” he writes, “can a species exploit existing opportunities, such as a warmer climate, a new source of food, or a superior form of shelter. In this view, any one adaptive radiation has to wait, possibly for a long time, until the right innovation arises. And the need to wait holds evolution back.”

In regard to evolutionary developments that at first seem to bear no fruit, Mr. Wagner could have quoted from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”:

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

In the world of human creativity, “full many” a terrific creation has been neglected or ignored in its time.

For the full review, see:

David P. Barash. “In Praise of Late Bloomers.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, April 29, 2023): C12.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed name, added, except for first one at the end of quoted passage from Baudelaire.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date April 28, 2023, and has the title “‘Sleeping Beauties’ Review: Nature’s Late Bloomers.”)

The book under review is:

Wagner, Andreas. Sleeping Beauties: The Mystery of Dormant Innovations in Nature and Culture. London: Oneworld Publications, 2023.

If Regulators Allow, Improved Photosynthesis Can Feed More of the Poor Using Less Land

(p. A13) For decades, scientists have pursued a tantalizing possibility for bolstering food supplies and easing hunger for the world’s poorest: improving photosynthesis, the biological process in plants that sustains nearly all life on Earth.

Now, researchers say that by using genetic modifications to increase the efficiency of photosynthesis, they significantly increased yields in a food crop, soybeans, providing a glimmer of potential that such methods could someday put more food on tables as climate change and other threats make it harder for vulnerable populations across the globe to feed their families.

. . .  Their methods will also have to pass muster with government regulators before crops transformed this way will ever reach farmers’ fields.

. . .

Without major changes to agriculture, governments’ targets for mitigating climate change are at risk, scientists warn. Yet addressing malnutrition and hunger in the short term might require pressing more land and other resources into service, which could accentuate warming.

That is why scientific advancements that could help us produce more nourishment without using more land, whether by improving photosynthesis or otherwise, hold such promise.

. . .

The new research in Illinois focuses on “non-photochemical quenching,” a mechanism in plants that protects them from sun damage. When plants are in bright sunlight, they often receive more light energy than they can use for photosynthesis. This mechanism helps them shed the excess energy harmlessly as heat. But after the plant is shaded again, it doesn’t stop very quickly, which means the plant wastes precious time and energy that could be put toward producing carbohydrates.

The researchers’ genetic transformations help plants adjust more quickly to shade. In multilayered plants like rice, wheat, maize and soy, this extra nimbleness could theoretically increase photosynthesis in the middle layers of leaves, which are constantly flitting between sunlight and shadow during the day.

For the full story, see:

Raymond Zhong and Clare Toeniskoetter. “Researchers Alter Genes To Refine Photosynthesis And Improve Crop’s Yield.” The New York Times (Friday, August 19, 2022): A13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug. 18, 2022, and has the title “Scientists Boost Crop Performance by Engineering a Better Leaf.”)

“Cochrane Reviews Are Often Referred to as Gold Standard Evidence in Medicine”

The credibility of Cochrane reviews matters. One of their most important reviews, that I cite in my in-progress work on clinical trials, suggests that results of randomized double-blind clinical trials, usually agree with results of observational studies on the same topic. This matters a lot, because observational studies can give us more and quicker actionable results, saving lives.

(p. A23) Cochrane reviews are often referred to as gold standard evidence in medicine because they aggregate results from many randomized trials to reach an overall conclusion — a great method for evaluating drugs, for example, which often are subjected to rigorous but small trials. Combining their results can lead to more confident conclusions.

. . .

. . . what we learn from the Cochrane review is that, especially before the pandemic, distributing masks didn’t lead people to wear them, which is why their effect on transmission couldn’t be confidently evaluated.

For the full commentary, see:

Zeynep Tufekci. “In Fact, the Science Is Clear That Masks Work.” The New York Times (Saturday, March 11, 2023): A23.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date March 10, 2023, and has the title “Here’s Why the Science Is Clear That Masks Work.”)

In His Bathysphere Beebe “Maintained a Sense of Childlike Optimism”

(p. 28) Beautifully written and beautifully made, “The Bathysphere Book” is a piece of poetic nonfiction that strives to conjure up the crushing blackness of the midnight zone. Full color, overflowing with stunning illustrations of the uncanny creatures that live beyond the sun, it raises questions of exploration and wonder, of nature and humanity, and lets readers find answers on their own.

. . .

As he slipped deeper and deeper beneath the waves, Beebe bore witness to “a black so black it called his very existence into question,” and saw creatures that could be recorded only by describing them to Else Bostelmann, a painter who worked like a police sketch artist to render animals she would never see in colors like “bittersweet orange, metallic opaline green, orange rufous and orange chrome.”

. . .

. . . he maintained a sense of childlike optimism that pervades the book, cutting through the limitless cold of the sea: “Having traveled the world from the depths of the sea to the highest mountains, tramped through jungles and flown across continents, Beebe was more and more adamant that wonder was not produced by swashbuckling adventures — it was a way of seeing, an attitude toward experience that was always available. At every turn, the world’s marvels were right before our eyes.”

For the full review, see:

W. M. Akers. “Under the Sea.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, June 4, 2023): 28-29.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated May 31, 2023, and has the title “Deep-Sea Creatures of Bittersweet Orange and Metallic Opaline Green.”)

The book under review is:

Fox, Brad. The Bathysphere Book: Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths. New York: Astra Publishing House, 2023.