Tag Archives: Pete Moore

Enhancing Me – Pete Moore ****

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This is one of a small series of books linked to the Dana Centre at the Science Museum in London. I’m a great fan of the Dana Centre – it’s a stylish cafe bar, where most evenings there is an informal and interactive session on once science topic or another. Like the Café Scientifique movement, it’s a great way of getting the science message across in a non-threatening way.

The point of the Dana Centre is to explore science and society and to get across aspects of science through the human side of the subject, and that certainly is the case here. Pete Moore, always a thoughtful science writer, ponders the nature of human enhancement, and whether we have really achieved it. This book is interesting to set alongside his previous title Being Me, a scientific exploration of what it means to be human.

The book mostly works round a relatively small series of interviews with those who have had medical treatment that could be regarded as enhancement, from an artificial heart mechanism to cochlear implants, and with scientists who feel that enhancement is possible. Along the way we come across concepts like improving the brain and the memory (oddly, one of Moore’s more hopeful possibilities is techniques to help people forget things, rather than remember them), and the use of drugs whether it’s to keep us more alert, or to enhance sports performance.

Perhaps the weakest aspect of the book is that it’s a bit depressing. There seems to be a lot more hype than hope. Although a couple of the scientists Moore talks to do have genuine hopes of positive enhancement, whether it’s life extension, cybernetic connection or the highly unlikely concept of uploading a human being to an electronic environment, the feeling is that most of the areas Moore looks at involve restoring some degree of existing ability, not making a genuine enhancement to the human condition.

In part, this negative outcome is due to Moore’s very tight definition of enhancement. Having thoughtfully discussed the options, he homes in on something that has to be internalized, made a real physical part of the human. I feel this is too tight. For me, enhancement can be quite simple. Any way we use technology to do something it would take another animal millions of years of evolution to achieve (carrying a water bottle, for instance) seems a genuine enhancement, and something that should be celebrated. Moore argues ‘To throw the net so wide… makes the term virtually meaningless. It becomes just an adjective to describe the human condition.’ I would take away that ‘just’ – yes, it’s what being human is about. Being human involves enhancing yourself. But is that really a negative?

Realistically, though, by keeping his definition of enhancement tight, Moore can explore some of the more interesting aspects of enhancement in depth, pondering, for instance, the difficult issue of what is and isn’t acceptable as an enhancement in sport. A thoughtful and thought provoking book.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Being Me – Pete Moore *****

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Doing something really different with a popular science book is both difficult and risky. Pete Moore has largely pulled this off in this unusual and personal exploration of what it means to be human.

The book is divided into sections, each addressing a different aspect of our human nature – embodied, conscious, genetic, historic, related, material, spiritual and so on. In each, Moore gives us a view of a different part of the complex mix that is a human being. If the content had just been Moore’s thoughts, the book would not have been particularly inspiring (not a criticism of the author’s ability to think, just the limitation of one person’s view), but what makes it so successful is that each of the sections is developed around one or more interviews with people who Moore sees as embodying the particular component (though, of course, like all of us, they have the other components as well).

Mostly this works remarkably effectively. Moore gives us a mix of scientific and philosophical theory, the interviews, and his personal view, including enough detail from his viewpoint of the interviews to make them more than a sterile set of quotes. The section that works least well, emphasizing the importance of the real people featured in the book, is the one on “the conscious being” which piles in too many pages of theory and isn’t so strongly based around the interviews.

This is a very personal book. The chances are you won’t agree with everything. But that’s not a bad thing with a topic like this. The section that most raised my eyebrows in this respect was the “social being” one, where a lot of focus is put on how modern society is lacking the social thread that is part of human nature, and that this isn’t good for us. Moore contrasts this with the African concept of ubuntu, which describes an intertwining of a human being with his fellow men and the environment, which Moore suggests leads to a much better support mechanism. This may be true, but makes a doubtful example. Moore does point out the paradox of the sometimes endemic violence in the same communities, but brushes this aside. I’m not sure this is wise. If part of the requirement for ubuntu is tribalism (which seems highly likely – it’s much easier to have strong social loyalty when it’s “us versus them”), then it comes at too high a price, as Rwanda and many other strife-torn nations can testify. This isn’t an ideal contrast to the isolation of the Western individual.

Inevitably – and Moore notes this – the book can’t be comprehensive. There are plenty of defining characteristics (Moore mentions language; I would think of creativity) that aren’t covered. That doesn’t really matter, though. The fact is that Moore has managed to paint a superb picture of the human being, using a scientific perspective, but admitting that science alone isn’t enough. If you thought you had seen it all when it comes to popular science, think again.

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Review by Brian Clegg

The Forensics Handbook – Pete Moore ***

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Crime science is great fun on the TV or to read about in novels. We just love to watch CSI, and Bones, and Waking the Dead and Silent Witness and all the rest – it’s detective fiction with a bit of science thrown in. And there’s no doubt that forensic science is now much more high profile, both as a result of the advanced techniques which are now employed like DNA matching, and because of high profile trials where expert witness evidence has been called into question. So it’s not surprising that there’s an interest in finding out more about the real thing – and that’s where Pete Moore’s book comes in.

If you are looking for a brief introduction to forensic science, who does what, the different techniques used and so forth, this is an excellent book – unfortunately from our viewpoint, though, it’s just not popular science. It’s interesting to compare it with Ngaire Genge’s The Forensic Casebook. That is a very readable and interesting book, but doesn’t tell you enough about the science. The Forensics Handbook, on the other hand, gives a good description of what the scientific tools are, and of the structures and methods of police forensics, but doesn’t provide any sort of narrative. It’s a set of descriptions, more like a mini-encyclopedia of forensics work. Moore’s book could also do with more on the science behind the tools. How do they work? How were they developed? We don’t find out, and though you might argue that a typical reader of a book like this wouldn’t be interested, you do need that sort of information (and a narrative structure) to make it popular science.

Where the book comes alive is when Moore uses real crimes as examples. The case files that are scattered through the book really transform the content, and work very well. But overall it feels as if something is lacking. You could almost see this as the skeleton of a popular science book – we just need Dr Moore to go back and fill in the meat of the subject.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Little Book of Big Ideas: Science – Pete Moore ***

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If you get it right, a book with lots of brief introductions to scientific ideas can work well. Take a look, for instance, at The Little Book of Scientific Principles etc. But it’s not easy to do well. The book can turn into a collection of facts that doesn’t work as a reference – because it’s not really designed to look things up in – but neither is it a book that is enjoyable to read from end to end.

That’s the challenge Pete Moore has set himself in Science. Considering the sweep of the subject, he does surprisingly well. The book is largely people driven – always a good way to make science approachable – with short sections on each of a wide range of scientists, detailing their achievements and contribution, with a very short touch of biographical detail. Occasionally (and rather randomly), you will get a section with a few pages on a specific scientific topic, like anatomy, evolution or electricity.

My biggest problem with this approach is that it reinforces the idea of the single, thrusting hero (or heroine) who comes up with the big idea, which is rather medieval and rarely happens in modern science. Because of the shortness of each section, we also tend to get the highly sanitised and triumphal approach of an old-fashioned children’s scientific biography, rather than something more sophisticated.

For example, despite Moore having himself written an excellent book on the way bacteria can increasingly resist antibiotics (The New Killer Germs), the section on Fleming makes it sound as if antibiotics were an unchallenged success. There are also one or two oddities of inclusion, though you can always find someone in a list like this to argue with. There are a couple of women scientists who it’s possible to argue are only there because they are women, while Stephen Hawking is surely only present because he’s famous – it’s very hard to pin down a high profile new idea in science that is experimentally verified that can be attributed to Hawking.

There are also a couple of slips. Newton has journeyed cross-country and now seems to have been born in Lancashire rather than Lincolnshire. And there’s a certain amount of confusion on the spelling of Joseph Priestley’s surname, mostly spelled Priestly (a spelling rarely used elsewhere), but at least once the more usual Priestley. (He’s also another example of what gets left out in such a compressed coverage. One of the most interesting things about Priestley was having his house burned down and being driven out of the country for his republican leanings, not mentioned here.) I’m also a bit worried about the statement that momentum is mv2, and the dramatic over-simplification of quantum theory to make it attributable to Heisenberg, including a strange statement that one way to look at the uncertainty principle is to say that “experiments were just not sophisticated enough [to predict what an electron would do inside an atom], but give it a few years and someone would solve the problem.” I know what Moore means, but it doesn’t come across right.

Overall, then, a bit of a curate’s egg. A nice collection of quick summaries of the achievements of some key individuals, clearly written, but driven by the format to huge oversimplification and occasional error.

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Review by Peter Spitz

The New Killer Germs – Pete Moore ****

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There is a real danger with a book like this. The message is stark. Bacteria and viruses (oh, and funguses too) are very good at damaging us, and though we briefly won the bacterial battle with antibiotics, there’s every chance that things are going to worse rather than better, because the more we ladle out the antibiotics, the more bacteria develop resistance. (And viruses don’t care anyway as antibiotics don’t affect them.) It’s the sort of message that is in danger of encouraging the reader to give up hope and go into a monastery. This sort of thing is okay in a newspaper or a magazine article, but in a book like this, we need more. Not just the dire warning – some practical conclusion. In the recent Viruses vs Superbugs, that “something more” was the use of phages, bacteria killing viruses. So what will Pete Moore offer us? Let’s keep you in suspense.

The book is certainly not a dull collection of facts. Moore has an engaging journalistic style that carries the reader along, despite the doom and gloom message. He takes us through all the dire killers, new and old (the “new” in the book’s title probably refers to Moore’s previous version, Killer Germs: Deadly Diseases of the Twenty-First Century, though this isn’t made clear in the text). They’re all there – plague, syphilis, anthrax etc. etc., plus the relatively newcomers like HIV/AIDS, Bird Flu (well, the latest version is a newcomer) and new variant CJD.

Moore is also very good on the subject of healthcare acquired infections – a political hot potato after the discovery of widespread MRSA in hospitals, and as Moore demonstrates, not one that has gone away just because there are anti-bacterial hand gel dispensers scattered around the wards. (It’s interesting that he observes it’s often the senior medical staff who don’t feel it’s necessary to make use of these dispensers.) In fact our whole attempt to counter killers seems half-doomed to failure, as practically anything we do to destroy the germs, apart from wipe them out with real destroyers like bleach (not exactly suitable for open wounds) gives them a chance to come up with a new resistance. Even worse, if a bacteria is over-exposed to (say) penicillin, it can also develop resistance to several other antibiotics. Like Viruses vs Superbugs, Moore mentions phages, but it’s in a brief chapter – if they sound interesting, get the other title as well for more detail.

The other message, which Moore doesn’t underline directly, but the thinking reader will receive, is just how dangerous air travel is. Forget crashing – it’s international travel that’s the killer. The reason most deadly diseases crop up around the world is that an infected carrier has hopped on a plane and taken something that would naturally have been quite restricted in its spread, on a journey to another continent It’s really possible to imagine a ban on all non-essential air travel to help humanity to survive. We have to ask ourselves whether a couple of weeks in the sun at an exotic location are worth it at the risk of spreading horribly painful and lethal diseases across the world. One impact this book ought to have (though I doubt it will) is an unexpected one of increasing the popularity of taking local vacations.

So is the verdict “not just gloom and doom”, or “if I’d wanted to depress myself I’d watch video tapes of 1970s soap operas”? It mostly is depression, I’m afraid. Perhaps the important message is that we don’t get blasé when all those warnings about bird flu or SARS seem to be false alarms. They were very real alarms, we just got lucky (at least, those of us who weren’t affected did) . The luck won’t continue. There will be more serious pandemics, whether from mutated bird flu or any of the other horrors in this book. This is a threat that makes everything terrorists have done relatively small beer. The war on these killer germs needs to be taken just as seriously – and Moore has done us all a service in bringing the situation clearly and understandably to us all. I can’t thank him for making me feel miserable, but I can support his cause in doing so.

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Review by Brian Clegg