This collection of interviews from the New York Times by one-time political journalist Claudia Dreifus works well as an introduction to various areas of current scientific interest. Each of the 38 conversations (11 with women) includes a two and a quarter by one and a half inch black and white photo of the interviewee, an introduction, some Q and A, and a postscript in which Dreifus reports on a follow-up. The persons being conversed with are mostly scientists, but there are medical practitioners, a couple of politicians, an AIDS victim, and some administrators. There are some superstars (Martin Rees, Arthur C. Clarke, Freeman Dyson, Stephen Jay Gould, Roger Penrose) and some others who are not very well known outside their area of expertise (e.g., Luis F. Baptista, Birute Galdikas), and still others who are perhaps best known for being in the public eye (Princess Diana's psychiatrist, Susie Orbach; National Public Radio's Ira Flatow; maverick science writer John Horgan). One has the sense that the conversations have been distilled from a larger essence.
The most striking interview is with Dr. Nawal M. Nour, a Sudanese-born gynecologist who treats African-American women in the Boston area who have been mutilated by so-called "female circumcision." Dreifus asks Nour if "These operations" are used "as a means of social control."
Dr. Nour's surprising response is that "the people who are perpetuating the practice are usually the women themselves." She adds, "I find that people do it because of a deeply ingrained belief that they are protecting their daughters. This not done to be hurtful, but out of love." (pp 171-172) Dr. Nour's prescription is to dispel such grotesque ignorance with education.
One of the most interesting interviews is with medical researcher Polly Matzinger, whom I've read about elsewhere. She is the ex-Playboy bunny and waitress who famously began her scientific career when a UC Berkeley professor, Robert Swampty Schwab, to whom she was serving beer, realized her talent after hearing her ask, "Why has no animal ever mimicked a skunk?" She is currently a leading proponent of the exciting idea that it is not "self" and "non-self" that our immune system distinguishes between, but instead between the benign and the dangerous. This is a radical idea that is "turning the world of immunology upside down." (p. 191)
Perhaps the most unusual "scientist" interviewed (at least in terms of his occupation) is self-styled "forensic mathematician" Charles Brenner. He does the mathematical calculations necessary to analyze DNA evidence.
The interview with physicist Freeman J. Dyson is interesting mainly because Dreifus got him to voice lukewarm support for the idea that Werner Heisenberg, Hitler's most talented physicist (and subject of the recent play Copenhagen) in part kept the bomb from the Nazis by not giving the project "the kind of push it needed." Dreifus also elicited Dyson's opposition to Bush's new Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars redux) "because the system doesn't work, mostly because it can be easily outwitted." (p. 22)
As a sometime sampler of "food supplements" I was interested in the conversation with Stephen E. Straus, the virologist who serves as Director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine in our government's National Institute of Health. He has a $90-million budget to test alternative approaches to medicine. This is significant because no one else has the resources do this sort of research on a scale large enough to be worthwhile. The drug companies will not do extensive research on food supplements because they can't patent the supplements and therefore feel such an investment will not pay off.
I enjoyed reading this collection and was intrigued to see how much Dreifus did with the limited space she had available for each interview. Her disarming style with a sharp sense of how to probe often overcame the inevitable superficiality inherent in conversations lasting only about six pages each. A case in point is the question she springs on celebrity psychiatrist, Susie Orbach: "Your highly influence 1978 book, Fat is a Feminist Issue, posited the idea that some women had eating disorders because they had been undernurtured by their mothers. Do you still believe that?" This is the kind of question--like "Do you still beat your wife?"--that one doesn't have to stick around to hear the answer to. The point has been made. Orbach does allow that if she were writing that book today, she "wouldn't write it in the same way."
