Essentially an anthology of scientific writing, including everything from research articles to works of fiction, these books are worth getting on your hands on. I know I’m three years late to this particular edition, but a lot of the articles still hold up, while others are simply timeless. A sampling of topics includes malaria, vaccines, and suicide, in a variety of prose.
My favourite belongs to Deb Hodgkin:
“You’ll have to indulge me a little here, but ‘elements and compounds’ is Year 7 or 8 science so this is class I teach pretty much every year. … Sodium is a soft, silvery metal that is extremely reactive in water… You would think that a substance with [sodium] in would be hazardous and treated with utmost care.
Introducing sodium chloride… made up of one chloride ion bonded to one sodium ion and forms a crystalline white solid. …Common table salt. …
And that’s why there has never been mercury in vaccines. There used to be a preservative called thimerosal … that contained mercury as part of a compound. But the properties of a compound have nothing to do with the properties of the elements that make it up. …
…Thimerosal and every other ingredient of a vaccine, needs to be evaluated on its own properties, not those of mercury or whatever other atoms happen to be in it. Otherwise you would need to be wary of poison gas when cooking, and stay well away from salt and vinegar chips – they might explode.”
So good.
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