NEXT OF KIN: What Chimpanzees Have Taught Me About Who We Are
By Roger Fouts, with Stephen Tukel Mills
Morrow, $25
As a modern Dr. Dolittle who talks to the animals, experimental psychologist Roger Fouts has been clinging to a roller coaster for 30 years. Fouts has become a kind of fringe player as his field has gone in and out of fashion, particularly in these reductionist days when genetics and the neurosciences have overshadowed the behavioral and social sciences–the so-called soft sciences–that study human nature.
Regardless of whether one agrees with his research, Fouts has been one of the most interesting, thoughtful and provocative people in the business. His odyssey from novice researcher to celebrity researcher to impassioned animal protectionist-researcher makes for a fascinating story long overdue. His memoir holds equal measures of heartbreak and hubris, cruelty and compassion. Since 1967, his life has been intertwined with that of a captive female chimpanzee named Washoe, whom he was hired to care for and tutor during experiments to determine if she could acquire an artificial language–the human language of signs–and to see what she had to say.
Washoe proved to be a champ, even among sign-language chimps, and taught the skill to her adopted son, according to Fouts. The “according to” typifies the problem that plagued the beguiling notion from the beginning. It hinged mainly on anecdote and interpretation later attributed by opponents to mimicry and inadvertent cueing of the animals by their human experimenters.
Research funding dried up and the rest of science moved on, believing it had been conned. From then on, Washoe turned out to be one lucky chimp. Fouts refused to abandon her, at the cost, many have said, of his own career. Without such heroes, the once-legendary simian conversationalists would have been condemned to life sentences in cramped cages, pumped full of carcinogens or forced to submit to AIDS experiments–for which, after scores of attempts, they have turned out to be a lousy model. Instead, Fouts and others made them celebrated causes.
Scientifically, at the very least Fouts opened a window into the mind of another primate, demonstrating that it holds intellectual capabilities previously thought to be uniquely human. His memoir is in the great tradition of his kind of science; it describes a lifetime in pursuit of secrets about who and what we are–the nature of human nature and how we may have gotten to be that way. And, in his own case, “Next of Kin” has much to say, about morality, perhaps, and about how we ought to live.
THE PLACEBO EFFECT: An Interdisciplinary Exploration
Edited by Anne Harrington
Harvard University Press, $39.95
The power of suggestion–the placebo effect, derived from the Latin placebo (“I shall please”)–by which people often feel better and are perhaps even cured because of faith instead of science, has caused medicine so much irritation that the profession goes to lengths to discount it by double-blind tests of new treatments and drugs. This book takes the opposite position, examining the phenomenon from a variety of perspectives as being important, powerful and capable of shedding insights into how symbols, settings and relationships can get under our skin.
For example, placebos are proving to be particularly effective in the treatment of depression–59 percent as effective as tricyclic antidepressants and 62 percent as good as lithium for manic-depressive disorder, studies have indicated. But placebos always flourish along with fraud, fallacies or unproven treatments (megavitamins, organic diets, excessive jogging), and other fads, the authors show. This book, drawing on contributions from fields as diverse as cultural anthropology, religion, pharmacology and molecular biology, reviews the roles of placebos in history and discusses the difficulties in making sense of them. At a time when quackery costs the nation an estimated $30 billion a year, such research couldn’t be more timely.
DANGER AHEAD: The Risks You Really Face on Life’s Highway
By Larry Laudan
John Wiley & Sons, $14.95 paper
It’s tough to keep the tally straight: fat is bad for you; so is alcohol, except for red wine; smoking is absolutely lethal, yet may prevent Alzheimer’s disease; aspirin prevents strokes, but thins the blood and irritates the stomach; estrogen cuts heart-disease risk and protects your bones, but increases cancer risk; sex is like that, too–having a lot protects against ovarian cancer, but ups the chance of cervical.
Risks would seem to obsess us. A recent study estimated that 47 percent of newspaper front-page stories concern the risks of modern life. Despite them all, Americans are living almost a decade longer than their counterparts at the turn of the century. The death rate from accidents is barely a third what it was in the 1930s. Mile for mile, driving is twice as safe as only a generation ago. And if AIDS has emerged as a serious threat, smallpox, polio, diphtheria and malaria are either gone or confined to limited areas.
It is the business of the shapers of opinion, contends Larry Laudan, a philosopher of science, to exaggerate risks in hopes of making people do what’s best for them. Warnings, Laudan shows, mean little, except in context. Trouble is, proper context often challenges the risk. “The biggest single threat from smoking is lung cancer,” he writes. “Smokers are hundreds of times more likely to get it than nonsmokers. Still, the fact is that a smoker–even a heavy smoker–is much more likely not to get lung cancer than to get it.” A cigarette smoker’s real annual risk of developing lung cancer is 1 in 250, he points out. Furthermore, he adds, despite the panic over the effects of second-hand smoke, the annual likelihood that a given individual will die as a result of it is about 1 in 80,000.
Laudan’s book often is hilarious. According to research, an 18-year-old male is twice as likely (80 percent) to have had premarital sex as a female of that age (41 percent). “Given this disparity,” Laudan notes, “one mildly wonders with whom the men are having it.”
The rules of science, he demonstrates, often go against the rules of common sense; relative risk (or how things stack up against one another) is usually much scarier than absolute risk. And a risk that scientists call statistically “significant” means only that there’s a 95 percent chance that two kinds of events are somehow connected, but nobody knows how. Everything in life is risky, Laudan sums up in this entertaining work, but most things are actually safer than they used to be.
THE SACRED HEART: An Atlas of the Body Seen Through Invasive Surgery
By Max Aguilera-Hellweg
Bulfinch, $50
This is a coffee-table book that everyone will instantly pick up–and probably just as quickly put back down. But if you’re not squeamish, photographer Max Aguilera-Hellweg has much to offer. A liver transplant. The removal of a brain tumor. A modified radical mastectomy. A Caesarean birth. They’re all here–stark, gruesome and sometimes oddly beautiful–along with scenes from 50 other surgical procedures. Somehow Aguilera-Hellweg captured them amid the high drama of the operating theater and with a level of stylistic and technical excellence designed to evoke everything from morbid fascination and disturbing annoyance to just plain terror. He became so fascinated by this subject that he enrolled in Columbia University’s pre-med program at 39. Who knows what kind of doctor he’ll make? But as an artist, the man tests you. He really does.
