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Tuesday, November 3, 2009

DEFYING SCIENCE

Irrational obstructiveness

"Denialism" (Penguin Press, $27.95)

Actress and anti-vaccination activist Jenny McCarthy is probably not going to be a big fan of this book by New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter: He points to McCarthy and other people who link vaccines and autism despite epidemiological studies to the contrary as examples of "how irrational thinking hinders scientific progress, harms the planet, and threatens our lives." He calls this phenomenon "denialism." The six chapters of the book read like New Yorker articles; Specter cites vaccination, genetically modified food, prescription medications and genomics among the areas where the public fears science at least as much as it embraces it.

WHAT'S NEXT

Beyond the here and now

"PopSci's Future Of" (Science Channel)

Take a tour of the year 2034 every Monday at 9 p.m. on the Science Channel with this new TV series, produced in cooperation with Popular Science magazine. Comedian and blogger Baratunde Thurston is the charismatic host, leading the viewer from one freaky invention to the next with wide-eyed enthusiasm. In one recent episode, "The Future of Habitat," Thurston test-drove a computer-operated car around the Stanford University campus, made ice cream on an anti-griddle that freezes instead of grills and learned about a chip that checks the body for disease by reading the DNA in a drop of blood.

-- Rachel Saslow