Lab reading list
In lab meeting a while back we were discussing books and other media that influenced our career paths, and some students suggested I post a list of mine. (I suppose this could be like my answer to the Ezra Klein podcast request to name 3 books that influenced you that you would recommend to others.) So, here is a list of four books and a documentary film that influenced me to become a scientist studying viral diseases. I recognize that they are 1-4 decades old now, but I think each one holds up for a variety of reasons.
Laurie Garrett. The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. Penguin, 1995.
"I read this book when it came out. I was a sophomore in college and it called out to me in the bookstore. At the time I was majoring in physics, but I was leaning toward biology. This book remains a tour de force explaining how the medical and scientific establishments decided that infectious disease had been conquered by the mid-20th century, only to experience recurrent emergence of new microbes and re-emergence of old ones. The chapter on the history of HIV alone is worth reading. Garrett's book directly inspired me to start working on HIV research. It seemed to me to combine interests in viral disease, virus emergence, public health, and social justice. Interestingly, my friends and UW colleagues Dave O'Connor and Matt Reynolds independently read this same book when they were in college. It also influenced them to choose careers in global health research."
Carl Sagan, Cosmos. Random House, 1980.
"I watched the original Cosmos series on PBS with my parents when I was a little kid. Carl Sagan immediately became a hero. He was a gifted scientific communicator and advocate for science. Watching the series made me want to be a scientist. Still today I frequently think of passages from the series. One thing I find particularly inspiring is a segment on Johannes Kepler. In Sagan's telling, Kepler really wanted to find a way to fit the orbital distances of the planets from the Sun into an idealized geometric model involving the Pythagorean solids. In the end, the data just wouldn't support it, and so Kepler followed the data and rejected his treasured hypothesis. This humility, this willingness to reject our favored ideas in light of the data, is a cornerstone of good science."
James Burke, The Day the Universe Changed. Little, Brown, 1985.
"This was a fascinating PBS series led by another gifted science communicator. The idea behind the title is that our mental models of the world affect what we allow ourselves to see and understand. When a new paradigm emerges in science, in a way you can say the universe itself changes, because the way we understand it changes. In each episode Burke traces the way a particular invention or idea changed the universe in this sense. Particularly relevant here is an episode about the history of medicine, which takes in everything from the development of anaesthetics (which allowed doctors to operate more and practice more) to the way that artificial dyes developed in Germany allowed scientists to visualize bacteria by staining them."
Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential. Bloomsbury, 2000.
"This book was recommended by my PhD mentor David Watkins, who found many parallels between the way Bourdain approached working in a kitchen and the way we should work in the lab. As someone who likes to cook, I agree! Bourdain explains with characteristic wit why it's important to keep your space clean and organized, and why you should prepare all the things you need to make your recipe before you start cooking (chefs call this mise en place). We can find a lot of inspiration here about how we should approach our lab work."
David France, director. How to Survive a Plague. IFC films, 2012.
"This is a brilliant documentary that immerses us in early HIV activism. It is inspiring to see how the people affected by HIV/AIDS and a few allies organized themselves to learn about immunology and virology and to pressure Congress, pharmaceutical companies, and society at large to respond to an emerging infectious disease that was scandalously ignored, in large part because of the communities most affected by it."