Siddhartha Mukherjee: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

In November 2010, NPR’s Fresh Air featured a story, “An Oncologist Writes a Biography of Cancer.” Oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee was treating one of his patients, a woman with advanced abdominal cancer who had relapsed multiple times, when she asked him what seemed like a simple question. "She said, 'I'm willing to go on, but before I go on, I need to know what it is I'm battling,' " Mukherjee tells NPR's Terry Gross. But, as Mukherjee explains, describing his patient's illness wasn't so simple. Defining cancer, he says, is something doctors and scientists have been struggling to do since the disease's first documented appearance thousands of years ago. Mukherjee's new book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, grew out of his desire to better understand the disease he treats, through examining the way cancer has been described and treated throughout history. He chronicles the ways therapies evolved, particularly in the 20th century, as more treatment options became available and scientists worked to understand the underlying genetic mutations that caused the disease.

“A breast cancer might turn out to have a close resemblance to a gastric cancer. And this kind of reorganization of cancer in terms of its internal genetic anatomy has really changed the way we treat and approach cancer in general.”

- Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of the book: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“What does it mean to be an oncologist? It means that you get to sit in at a moment of another person’s life that is so hyper-acute, and not just because they’re medically ill. It’s also a moment of hope and expectation and concern. It’s a moment when you get to erase everything that’s irrelevant and ask the most elemental questions — about survival, family, children, legacy.”

- Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of the book: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

In November 2010, The Economist published “With hope, farewell fear: The long struggle to understand cancer.” It is said that when the good burghers of Amsterdam were first presented with a rhinoceros—armored, horned, three-toed, with a prehensile lip—spectators shook their heads in disbelief. Cancer provokes a similar bafflement. So protean are its forms and so varied its features that even specialist prognoses of aggressiveness, invasion and response to treatment have typically generated more exceptions than rules. Apparently, identical cancers in two patients may behave so unlike as to appear utterly different diseases. Siddhartha Mukherjee’s “The Emperor of All Maladies” tells of the search for a “unifying theory” of cancer, the common attribute of all types of malignant cell growth that might reveal its cure. The arc of this rich and engrossing book matches Mr. Mukherjee’s personal evolution as an oncologist, beginning on the first day of his hospital residency. It seems that the diversity of this implacable, shape-shifting foe will defeat him. He is faced with dead-end discoveries, therapeutic disasters and revelations that lead only to more mysteries. But with the perceptiveness and patience of a true scientist he begins to weave these individual threads into a coherent and engrossing narrative.

“If there's a seminal discovery in oncology in the last 20 years, it's that idea that cancer genes are often mutated versions of normal genes. And the arrival of that moment really sent a chill down the spine of cancer biologists. Because here we were hoping that cancer would turn out to be some kind of exogenous event — a virus or something that could then be removed from our environment and our bodies and we could be rid of it — but as it turns out, cancer genes are sitting inside each and every one of our chromosomes, waiting to be corrupted or activated.”

- Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of the book: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

David A. Vise, Mark Malseed: The Google Story

In November 2005, David A Vise wrote “What Lurks in Its Soul?” for The Washington Post. Google doesn't need all that computer power to help us search for the best Italian restaurant in Northern Virginia. It has grander plans. The company is quietly working with maverick biologist Craig Venter and others on groundbreaking genetic and biological research. Google's immense capacity and turbo-charged search technology, it turns out, appears to be an ideal match for the large amount of data contained in the human genome. Venter and others say that the search engine has the ability to deal with so many variables at once that its use could lead to the discovery of new medicines or cures for diseases. Sergey Brin says searching all of the world's information includes examining the genetic makeup of our own bodies, and he foresees a day when each of us will be able to learn more about our own predisposition for various illnesses, allergies and other important biological predictors by comparing our personal genetic code with the human genome, a process known as "Googling Your Genes."

“Soon after moving into their new offices in Palo Alto, Google expanded to eight employees and struggled to keep up with the growing number of daily searches. Its unique system of computing, which adapted cheap PC parts and custom software into a small supercomputer, gave it the power to handle a rising number of search requests and ever larger downloads of the Web.”

- David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, authors of the book: The Google Story

“We have been wrong on lots of occasions. It was the quality of the service that Google provided that was demonstrably better than you could get anywhere else. That is why we invested. And as the Internet developed, we thought search would be more important, not less important.”

- Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital

The Googleplex  

In November 2005, Janet Maslin wrote “Sorting the World by Design” for The New York Times. "The Google Story," by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, describes the lava lamps, AstroTurf, beach volleyball, celebrity-caliber fried chicken and touch-pad-controlled toilets that have given Google's cloistered Googleplex campus in Mountain View, Calif., its much-vaunted Peter Pan atmosphere. On a different note, "The Google Story" also includes an aerial view of the Googleplex taken from a B-24 bomber, with a machine gun visible in the foreground. Sunny or sinister? Either is a way to describe Google's fast, unstoppable rise from humble academic beginnings at Stanford University to (in the words of the author of "The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture," John Battelle) "holding the world by the thoughts."

“Moritz had first met Brin and Page through Yahoo’s David Filo back when they were stil students at Stanford. Moritz and his firm, Sequoia Capital, and backed Yahoo with $2 million and reaped a big gain from Yahoo’s $32 million IPO in 1996. Around that same time, Brin and Page were gathering information about starting a company, including valuation methods and other techniques, so they could work out an agreement with Stanford that would facilitate the patenting of PageRank and enable them to license it from the school.”

- David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, authors of the book: The Google Story

“With tech-savvy early investors such as Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos to provide them with advice, Brin and Page decided to reach out simultaneously to two of the most established and prestigious venture capital firms in Silicon Valley: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Sequoia Capital. If Things went well, their goal was to get both firms to pump cash into Google while leaving neither in charge of the company.”

- David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, authors of the book: The Google Story

In January 2006, John Lanchester wrote “Engine trouble” for The Guardian. Google is the only multi-billion-dollar company in the world that is also a spelling mistake. Back in the palaeolithic era (that's the palaeolithic era in the internet sense, i.e. autumn 1997), its co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were graduate computer science students at Stanford. They were working on an insanely cool new search engine, wanted to incorporate it as a company, and needed to find a name. David Vise, in his breezy book The Google Story, tells how they came up with one. A fellow graduate student suggested to Page and Brin that they use the name given to what is sometimes, erroneously or metaphorically, called the largest number, 10100: google. They looked up the name on the internet, found that it wasn't taken, and registered their brand-new brand, google.com. The next morning they found that the reason the name hadn't been taken was because it should be spelled googol - and that googol.com had, of course, already been bagged. Lesser men might have considered that a bad omen, but Page and Brin are not bad-omen kind of guys. A little more than eight years later, Google is the fastest-growing company in the history of the world - with, at the time of writing, a market capitalisation of $129bn. Page and Brin, the Wallace and Gromit of the information age, are worth more than $10bn each.

“Brin and Page were persuaded that they had found the path toward a Ph.D. thesis by applying PageRank to the Internet. By early 1997, Page had developed a primitive search engine that he named BackRub because it dealt with the incoming—or “back”—links to Web pages. Ever thrifty, Page put his left hand on a scanner, converted the image to black and white, and the new BackRub site had its logo. Page, Brin, and Motwani all contributed ideas to the evolving project. Motwani said that it would soon become clear that what they had created together was more than just a way to further their academic research. Without intending to, the trio had devised a ranking system for the Internet.”

- David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, authors of the book: The Google Story

The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics from PRI: Science and Creativity from Studio 360 by interact@pri.org

When science fiction was just catching on in the early 20th century, writers looked to the field of quantum mechanics for ideas. They sensationalized scientific advancements and sparked public fear. Physics professor James Kakalios — author of The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics — tells Kurt about the real science behind death rays and atomic radiation. Listen to the podcast.

Tim Wu: The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

Theodore Newton Vail, born July 16, 1845, was a U.S. telephone industrialist. His philosophy of using closed systems, centralized power, and as much network control as possible, in order to maintain monopoly power, is what’s come to be known as Vailism. He served as the president of American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) between 1885 and 1889, and again from 1907 to 1919 (the company was named “American Telephone & Telegraph” before 1894). Vail convinced President Woodrow Wilson that the telephone as a medium of communication would spread more rapidly if brought under one monopoly, so as to ensure uniform provision of services throughout the country. He called this "one system, one policy, universal service."

“Mr. Vail is a big man.”

- Thomas Edison

According to Columbia University, professor and policy advocate Tim Wu (Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World), the great information empires of the 20th century have followed a clear and distinctive pattern: after the chaos that follows a major technological innovation, a corporate power intervenes and centralizes control of the new medium: the master switch. Tim Wu chronicles the turning points of the century’s information landscape: those decisive moments when a medium opens or closes, from the development of radio to the Internet revolution, where centralizing control could have devastating consequences. To Tim Wu, subjecting the information economy to the traditional methods of dealing with concentrations of industrial power is an unacceptable control of our most essential resource. He advocates not a regulatory approach but rather a constitutional approach that would enforce distance between the major functions in the information economy—between those who develop information, those who own the network infrastructure on which it travels, and those who control the venues of access—and keep corporate and governmental power in check. By fighting vertical integration, a Separations Principle would remove the temptations and vulnerabilities to which such entities are prone. The Tim Wu book is engaging, a remarkable historical narrative that makes for a compelling and galvanizing cry for sanity—and necessary deregulation—in the information age.

“History shows a typical progression of information technologies: from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel—from open to closed system.”

- Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“Wireless is going to be a big problem because as these smart phones develop into more complex devices, I think the consumers will expect the same kind of experience on their wireless device than they expect on their wired connection at home. There may be a performance difference, but you wouldnt expect that you would be told you cant use certain applications.”

- Scott Jordan, professor at the University of California at Irvine

In December 2010, David Leonhardt wrote “From Hobby to Industry” for The New York Times. AT&T is the star of the new Tim Wu book, an intellectually ambitious history of modern communications. The organizing principle — only rarely overdrawn — is what Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, calls “the cycle.” “History shows a typical progression of information technologies,” he writes, “from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel — from open to closed system.” Eventually, entrepreneurs or regulators smash apart the closed system, and the cycle begins anew. The Master Switch covers the history of phones, radio, television, movies and, finally, the Internet. All of these businesses are susceptible to the cycle because all depend on networks, whether they’re composed of cables in the ground or movie theaters around the country. Once a company starts building such a network or gaining control over one, it begins slouching toward monopoly. If the government is not already deeply involved in the business by then (and it usually is), it soon will be. Tim Wu argues that the government has little choice. Not only are communications businesses particularly prone to consolidation, but the political effects are far greater than they would be in other industries. The Tim Wu book’s title comes from a line by Fred Friendly, the longtime CBS News executive, in which he distinguished between free-speech laws and “exclusive custody of the master switch.” They are two different things, but either has the ability to shape the flow of information. The same cannot be said, Tim Wu notes, “of orange juice, heating oil, running shoes or dozens of other industries, no matter their size.”

“The reason people like Google or Facebook is it's just simpler. If we go back to AT&T in the 1910s, we had a monopoly for 70 years, and why was that? It was easy—you picked up the telephone, and it worked. There's nothing wrong with that. But our desire to follow the leader does tend to lead to monopolization.”

- Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (Borzoi Books)

Seth Mnookin: The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear

The MMR vaccine controversy refers to claims that autism spectrum disorders are a direct result to having the MMR vaccine administered. MMR is an immunization against measles, mumps and rubella. Claims of a connection between the vaccine and autism surfaced in a 1998 paper, The Lancet, a respected British medical journal. Investigation by Sunday Times journalist Brian Deer discovered that the lead author of the article, Andrew Wakefield, had multiple undeclared conflicts of interest, had manipulated evidence, and had broken other ethical guidelines and codes. The Lancet retracted the, and Wakefield was found guilty by the General Medical Council of serious professional misconduct in May 2010, and was struck off the Medical Register—meaning he could no longer practice as a doctor in the United Kingdom. In 2011, media circulated the news that the BMJ had declared the research about the MMR link to autism “fraudulent.”

"This type of cognitive relativism — or "truthiness," as fictional talk show host Stephen Colbert termed it — has become the defining intellectual trend of our time."

- Seth Mnookin, The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear

"It gives credence to the belief that we can intuit our way through all of the various decisions we need to make in our lives and it validates the notion that our feelings are a more reliable barometer of reality than the facts."

- Seth Mnookin; April 2010, Larry King Live

"Looking at the diseases mumps, measles and rubella in a country like the US... it doesn't tend to be a problem. Children will do fine with these diseases in a developed country that has good nutrition. And because I live in a country where the norm is vaccine, I can delay my vaccines."

- Mother of a grade-schooler that was infected while on vacation in Europe

“By 2005 … a preoccupation with vaccine safety and an opposition to traditional institutions were viewed by an ever-growing number of ‘autism advocates’ as prerequisites for membership in their community.”

- Seth Mnookin, The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear

In January 2011, David M. Shribman wrote “Anatomy of a panic” for the Boston Globe. In the past decade Seth Mnookin has become a chronicler of some of the icons of American popular culture. He wrote a popular book, Feeding the Monster,on the ascent of the Red Sox, and a controversial book, Hard News, on the scandals of The New York Times. Now he is taking on another modern phenomenon, the movement against vaccinations. "The Panic Virus"is sure to attract attention — and the virulent criticism of one of contemporary life’s most ardent insurgencies, those who believe inoculations possess the power to injure. Specifically the Seth Mnookin book focuses on the scare triggered by a flawed 1998 scientific paper suggesting that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine could cause autism. […] In his book, Seth Mnookin traces the spread of the panic and the role of the media in it. A new parent himself, Mnookin admits a certain fear of vaccines — but an even greater fear that his child might encounter someone with measles or whooping cough before he gets all his shots. He understands the panic and passion of parents with sick children — but fears that waves of “self-righteous hysteria’’ have the power of overcoming “critical thinking.’’ […] The Seth Mnookin book is an unsparing brief against the vaccine skeptics. But in a larger sense, this volume is less about the insurrection against inoculations than it is about the democratization of information. It is less about the movement to battle the medical establishment than it is about the ability of social networks to mobilize for what Seth Mnookin and most mainstream scientists and doctors believe is a bad cause.

"That MMR paper is the best example there has ever been of a very, very dodgy paper that has created a lot of discomfort and misery."

- Dr Richard Smith, editor of the British Medical Journal, speaking about Dr. Andrew Wakefield's MMR-autism research

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"Anxiety about the individual's fate in industrialized societies [plays a role in motivating anti-vaccination crusaders]. Then, as now, they appealed to knee-jerk populism by conjuring up an imaginary elite with an insatiable hunger for control. [...] Then, as now, they preached the superiority of subjective beliefs over objective proofs, of knowledge acquired by personal experience rather than through scientific rigor."

- Seth Mnookin, The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear

January 2011: Dr. Michael Shermer, publisher of the Skeptic Magazine and author of the forthcoming book, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths, wrote “An Epidemic of Ignorance” for the Wall Street Journal. Seth Mnookin's "The Panic Virus" is a lesson on how fear hijacks reason and emotion trumps logic. But the story starts with a bit of bad science. On Feb. 26, 1998, the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet published a paper by a medical researcher named Andrew Wakefield who claimed that he had found a causal link between autism and the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine. Even though the journal's editors made it clear that further research was needed, at a press conference Dr. Wakefield announced: "With the debate over MMR that has started, I cannot support the continued use of the three vaccines given together." […] In a brilliant piece of reportage and science writing, Seth Mnookin explains precisely how medical researchers set about determining whether there is a causal connection in an apparent pattern. "Broadly speaking, there are three ways scientists collect data to test new theories," he explains. "The best possible method is through a randomized clinical trial, in which researchers take a sampling of a population and arbitrarily test their hypothesis on one half while leaving the other half untouched."

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From the website of the James Randi Educational Foundation, dated April 1, 2009: Jenny McCarthy is well known as a model and actor, but in recent days she's getting far more publicity for her stance that vaccines cause autism. She has a son who may be autistic, and of course we are sympathetic to her plight. But that can only go so far when Ms. McCarthy appears on endless chat shows, is interviewed in magazine articles, and even writes books encouraging people not to vaccinate their children. Numerous, well-done studies have shown conclusively that there is no causal link between vaccines and the onset of autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) - the claim that they are connected is spurious, based on anecdotes and the fact that vaccines are given to children around the same time that ASD symptoms begin to appear. The antivaccination movement has been directly linked with outbreaks of various vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles, and there have been numerous illnesses and even deaths associated with these outbreaks. The facts are in, and have been for quite some time: vaccines are an overwhelming modern medical success story, having eradicated such scourges as smallpox, and hugely lowering rates of other diseases such as measles, mumps, rubella, polio, influenza, and diptheria. The evidence is also overwhelmingly against any link between vaccines and autism as well. Yet all that evidence has been overturned in the public's mind with ease and alacrity by Ms. McCarthy, so she wins the Pigasus award for her contribution to the country's ill-health.

Antonio Damasio: Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain

The study of the evolution of emotions dates back to the 19th century. Charles Darwin famously applied the theory of evolution and natural selection to the study of human communication in his 1872 work, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Charles Darwin researched the expression of emotions in an effort to support his theory of evolution. He proposed that much like other traits found in humans and animals, emotions, also, evolved and were adapted over time. His work looked at not only facial expressions in both humans and animals, but attempted to point out parallels between behaviors in animals and in humans. It’s this area of science that author and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has focused on for much of his life. As he has done previously, Antonio Damasio (Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain) explores the process that leads to consciousness. Moreover, as he has also done previously, he alternates between some exquisite passages that represent the best popular science has to offer and some technical verbiage that few will be able to follow. Antonio Damasio draws meaningful distinctions among points on the continuum from brain to mind, consciousness to self, constantly attempting to understand the evolutionary reasons why each arose and attempting to tie each to an underlying physical reality. Antonio Damasio goes to great lengths to explain that many species, such as social insects, have minds, but humans are distinguished by the "autobiographical self," which adds flexibility and creativity, and has led to the development of culture, a "radical novelty" in natural history. Antonio Damasio ends with a speculative chapter on the evolutionary process by which mind developed and then gave rise to self. In the Pleistocene, he suggests, humans developed emotive responses to shapes and sounds that helped lead to the development of the arts.

"The time will come when the issue of human responsibility, in general moral terms as well as on matters of justice and its application, will take into account the evolving science of consciousness."

- Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain

"Emotions proper are merely an integrated crown jewel of life regulation."

"In a generation that has grown up multitasking, in the digital age, the upper limits of attention in the human brain are being rapidly raised, something that is likely to change certain aspects of consciousness in the not-too-distant future, if it has not done so already. Breaking the glass ceiling of attention has obvious advantages, and the associate abilities generated by multitasking are a terrific advantage; but there may be trade-off costs in terms of learning, memory consolidation, and emotion. We have no idea what these costs may be."

- Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain

"Which kind of consciousness is primordial? Is the self fundamental for consciousness, as Damasio suggests? Or does awareness come when we take in information without having to do anything about it, and is the attending and planning self merely an elaborate construction on top of that, as the Buddhists or David Hume would argue?"

- Alison Gopnik, Slate.com

In November 2010, Alison Gopnik wrote “How Weird Is Consciousness? Scientists may not even be asking the right questions.” for the Slate.com: Antonio Damasio is a neuroscientist who has done illuminating research on emotion, decision-making, and our perception of our own bodies. He was also one of the brave early researchers who tackled the problem of consciousness head-on, and he was rewarded by several successful popular books. Unfortunately, in Self Comes to Mind, Antonio Damasio seems to have jumped the shark. The book doesn't include either the new scientific research of the last 10 years or new philosophical clarity—although the style is readable, if a bit high-flown, it's often hard to make out the arguments. Instead, the book is a rather wandering and digressive restatement, with some minor variations, of Damasio's earlier views on consciousness. […] The trouble with Damasio's hypothesis, as with all the hypotheses about capital-C Consciousness, is figuring out how you could test it. There is only one organism that I'm sure is conscious (namely, me), and there are only a few more organisms that tell me they are also conscious (namely, my fellow humans), though I'm pretty sure that my other fellow animals are conscious, too. Just to make things worse, the more you think about it, the less sure you are about the nature of your own consciousness, let alone that of other organisms. The philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel has collected many examples that shake your belief that you always know about your own experiences. For example, were you conscious a moment ago of the feeling of your feet in your shoes? You are now, of course, but were you before I made you think about it?

"As humans debate the benefits or perils of cultural trends, and of developments such as the “digital revolution,” it may help to be informed about how our flexible brains create consciousness."

- Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain

Michio Kaku: Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100

Publisher-provided book-description: Based on interviews with over three hundred of the world’s top scientists, who are already inventing the future in their labs, Kaku—in a lucid and engaging fashion—presents the revolutionary developments in medicine, computers, quantum physics, and space travel that will forever change our way of life and alter the course of civilization itself. His astonishing revelations include: The Internet will be in your contact lens. It will recognize people’s faces, display their biographies, and even translate their words into subtitles; You will control computers and appliances via tiny sen­sors that pick up your brain scans. You will be able to rearrange the shape of objects; Sensors in your clothing, bathroom, and appliances will monitor your vitals, and nanobots will scan your DNA and cells for signs of danger, allowing life expectancy to increase dramatically; Radically new spaceships, using laser propulsion, may replace the expensive chemical rockets of today. You may be able to take an elevator hundreds of miles into space by simply pushing the “up” button. Like Physics of the Impossible and Visions before it, Physics of the Future is an exhilarating, wondrous ride through the next one hundred years of breathtaking scientific revolution.

Michio Kaku On Future Civilization - The best video clips are here

Michio Kaku (加來 道雄 Kaku Michio, born January 24, 1947) is an American physicist, the Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics in the City College of New York of City University of New York, the co-founder of string field theory, and a "communicator" and "popularizer" of science. He has written several books on physics and related topics, has made frequent appearances on radio, television and film and writes extensive online blogs and articles. Michio was born in San Jose, California to Japanese immigrant parents. His grandfather came to the United States to take part in the clean-up operation after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. His father was born in California but was educated in Japan, so spoke little English. Both his parents were put in the Tule Lake War Relocation Center, where they met and where his brother was born. Kaku attended Cubberley High School in Palo Alto in the early 1960s and played first board on their chess team. At the National Science Fair in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he attracted the attention of physicist Edward Teller, who took Kaku as a protégé, awarding him the Hertz Engineering Scholarship. Kaku graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University with a B.S. degree in 1968 and was first in his physics class. He attended the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and received a Ph.D. in 1972 and held a lectureship at Princeton University in 1973. During the Vietnam War, Kaku completed his U.S. Army basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia and his advanced infantry training at Fort Lewis, Washington. However, the Vietnam War ended before he was deployed as an infantryman.

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From Wikipedia: Michio Kaku was a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and New York University. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He is listed in Who's Who in Science and Engineering, and American Men and Women of Science. He has published research articles on string theory from 1969 to 2000. In 1974, along with Prof. K. Kikkawa, he wrote the first paper on string field theory, now a major branch of string theory, which summarizes each of the five string theories into a single equation. In addition to his work on string field theory, he also authored some of the first papers on multi-loop amplitudes in string theory, the first paper on the divergences of these multi-loop amplitudes, the first paper on supersymmetry breaking at high temperatures in the early universe, the first paper on super-conformal gravity, and also some of the first papers on the non-polynomial closed string field theory. Many of the ideas he first explored have since blossomed into active areas of string research. His most recent research publication, on bosonic quantum membranes, was published in Physical Review in 2000. Kaku is the author of several doctoral textbooks on string theory and quantum field theory and has published 170 articles in journals covering topics such as superstring theory, supergravity, supersymmetry, and hadronic physics. He is also author of the popular science books: Visions, Hyperspace, Einstein's Cosmos, and Parallel Worlds, and co-authored Beyond Einstein with Jennifer Thompson. Hyperspace was a best-seller and was voted one of the best science books of the year by both The New York Times and The Washington Post. Parallel Worlds was a finalist for the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction in the UK. In Physics of the Impossible, he examines the technologies of invisibility, teleportation, precognition, star ships, antimatter engines, time travel and more—all regarded as things that are not possible today but that might be possible in the future. In this book, he ranks these subjects according to when, if ever, these technologies might become reality. In March 2008, Physics of the Impossible entered the New York Times best-seller list, and stayed on for five weeks.







From the Science Channel: Dr. Michio Kaku holds the Henry Semat Professorship in Theoretical Physics at the City College of New York and also the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He graduated summa cum laude, and first in his physics class, from Harvard, and received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Calif. at Berkeley. He has taught at Harvard, Princeton, and for over 30 years at the City Univ. of New York. He has been a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He is the co-founder of string field theory. His Ph.D. level textbooks on string theory are required reading at many of the world's leading physics laboratories. He has appeared on the Larry King Show, 60 Minutes, 20/20, Good Morning America, CNN, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, and BBC World. He has done numerous interviews with PBS's Nova, the Discovery Channel, the Science Channel, the History Channel, the National Geographic Channel. Dr. Kaku has also hosted numerous science specials. He hosted a 4-part series about Time for the Science Channel. He hosted a 3-part series about the future called 2057 for the Discovery Channel. He hosted a 3-hour series called Visions of the Future for BBC, soon to air in the U.S. on Science Channel.

Nicholas Carr: The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

"Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains" is a magazine article technology author Nicholas Carr. The article—or rather, the essay—was highly critical of the Internet's effect on cognition. The essay was published in the July, August 2008 issue of The Atlantic magazine, as a six-page cover story. The essay builds upon Carr's book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (in particular, it builds upon The Big Switch’s last chapter, "iGod". Nicholas Carr’s main argument in The Atlantic essay is that the Internet might have detrimental effects on cognition, i.e. the internet diminishes the capacity for concentration and contemplation. Despite the title, the article is not singling out Google, but is more a critique of the technological utopianism, surrounded by the fervor of the latest and greatest technological fad, be that Web 2.0 technologies, social media, etc. Nicholas Carr builds on these threads further, in his latest book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, published in June 2010.

“You want access to as much information as possible so you can discern what is most relevant and correct. The solution isn’t to limit the information you receive. Ultimately you have to have the entire world’s knowledge connected directly to your mind.”

- Google co-founder, Sergey Brin; in a 2004 interview with Playboy Magazine

"I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I feel it most strongly when I’m reading. My brain wasn’t just drifting. It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it."

- Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

The Effects of the Internet and Its Technologies on Reading Behaviors: Nicholas Carr asserts that using the Internet can lead to a lower attention span, and can make it more difficult to read in the traditional sense (that is, read a book at length without mental interruptions). Nicholas Carr says that he and his friends have found it more difficult to concentrate and read whole books, even though they read a great deal when they were younger (that is, when they did not have access to the Internet). Researchers from the University College London have done a 5-year study on Internet habits, and have found that people using websites on a regular basis exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited.

"It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense."

- University College London, School of Life and Medical Sciences

"But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available". A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance—as we all become "pancake people"—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button."

- Richard Foreman, March 2005

In June 2010, Jonah Lehrer wrote “Our Cluttered Minds” for The New York Times. While Nicholas Carr tries to ground his argument in the details of modern neuroscience, his most powerful points have nothing do with our plastic cortex. Instead, “The Shallows” is most successful when Nicholas Carr sticks to cultural criticism, as he documents the losses that accompany the arrival of new technologies. The rise of the written text led to the decline of oral poetry; the invention of movable type wiped out the market for illuminated manuscripts; the television show obliterated the radio play (if hardly radio itself). Similarly, numerous surveys suggest that the Internet has diminished our interest in reading books. Carr quotes Wallace Stevens’s poem “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm,” in which stillness allows the reader to “become a book.” The incessant noise of the Internet, Nicholas concludes, has turned the difficult text into an obsolete relic.

"In the choices we have made, consciously or not, about how we use our computers, we have rejected the intellectual tradition of solitary, single-minded concentration, the ethic that the book bestowed on us."

- Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

"Thought will spread across the world with the rapidity of light, instantly conceived, instantly written, instantly understood. It will blanket the earth from one pole to the other — sudden, instantaneous, burning with the fervor of the soul from which it burst forth. This will be the reign of the human word in all its plenitude. Thought will not have time to ripen, to accumulate into the form of a book — the book will arrive too late. The only book possible from today is a newspaper."

- French poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine, 1831, on the proliferation of the burgeoning medium of the day, the newspaper

In September 2010, Steven Poole criticized the Nicholas Carr book, The Shallows: Like the majority of contemporary books, then, The Shallows does not justify its length: its natural form was always that of a pithy provocation, so as an argument for the superiority of book-length prose it is rather self-defeating. Sometimes, however, it does seem as though the author's memory really has been degraded by his internet abuse. "It's possible to think deeply while surfing the net," Carr admits on page 116, thus momentarily torpedoing the determinism on which his jeremiad is predicated, before he gets back on message a mere three pages later, accusing the net of "preventing our minds from thinking either deeply or creatively". Well, both cannot be true. Either you can think deeply when using the internet, or the internet prevents you from doing so. It is easy to see which version is correct; and which version, conversely, makes for a more polemically enticing sales pitch. All too rarely do defenders of books (and, for that matter, newspapers) ask themselves the uncomfortable question: might it be that people are reading fewer of the products not because people are becoming more stupid but because many of the products are not actually very good?

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“The better we get at multitasking, the worse we get at critical thinking”

- Nicholas Carr tells Stephen Colbert

“Shallowness, isn’t that a judgment call?”

- Stephen Colbert asks Nicholas Carr about the wording of the title of his book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

"In arguing that books are archaic and dispensable, Federman and Shirky provide the intellectual cover that allows thoughtful people to slip comfortably into the permanent state of distractedness that defines the online life."

- Nicholas Carr in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

In July 2008, Clay Shirky, digital-media scholar at New York University, wrote “Why Abundance is Good: a Reply to Nick Carr.” Despite the sweep of the title, it’s focused on a very particular kind of reading, literary reading, as a metonym for a whole way of life. You can see this in Carr’s polling of “literary types,” in his quoting of Wolf and the playwright Richard Foreman, and in the reference to War and Peace, the only work mentioned by name. Now War and Peace isn’t just any piece of writing, of course; it is one of the longest novels in the canon, and symbolizes the height of literary ambition and of readerly devotion. But here’s the thing: it’s not just Carr’s friend, and it’s not just because of the web—no one reads War and Peace. It’s too long, and not so interesting. This observation is no less sacrilegious for being true. The reading public has increasingly decided that Tolstoy’s sacred work isn’t actually worth the time it takes to read it, but that process started long before the internet became mainstream. Much of the current concern about the internet, in fact, is a misdirected complaint about television, which displaced books as the essential medium by the 1970s.

Fen Montaigne: Fraser's Penguins: A Journey to the Future in Antarctica

Fen Montaigne is a journalist and author whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic, Outside, Smithsonian, and The Wall Street Journal. A former Moscow bureau chief of The Philadelphia Inquirer, he is the author of Reeling in Russia and has co-authored two other books. For his work on Fraser's Penguins, Montaigne was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006. He now works as senior editor of the online magazine Yale Environment 360. From: Macmillan Publishing. In December, 2010, the author and his latest book, Fraser's Penguins: A Journey to the Future in Antarctica., was a guest on the NPR program, Talk of the Nation. The podcast of that show is embedded just below.



Also in December of 2010, The New York Times wrote this about the book and author: In the austral summer of 2005-6, the veteran magazine journalist Fen Montaigne traveled to Palmer Station in Antarctica to work with the highly regarded polar ecologist Bill Fraser. For nearly five months, Montaigne gamely weighed and banded Adélie penguins and their predators, attached radio tags to feathers, dodged shooting streams of gack (giant-petrel vomit), sifted through guano in search of silverfish otoliths and reveled in the sensory delights of “the most alien and beautiful place on the planet.” But this is no straightforward work of natural history with Fraser as heroic guide. It’s a morality tale, in which Fraser plays an unsociable Cassandra who’s entrusted his tidings to a sympathetic messenger. Luckily for readers, Montaigne has wrapped his portrait of a place on the brink of oblivion inside a penguin love fest.