[Preventing future pandemics, the secrets of the Higgs boson and
the surprising roots of plastic surgery]
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BEST SCIENCE BOOKS OF 2022  
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Alok Jha
December 3, 2022
The Guardian
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_ Preventing future pandemics, the secrets of the Higgs boson and the
surprising roots of plastic surgery _

, Jonny Wan

 

The Covid-19 pandemic might be fading into the background for many
people in the rich world but Bill Gates, software pioneer and
philanthropist, wants those in power to learn some lessons fast.
In HOW TO PREVENT THE NEXT
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[[link removed]]PANDEMIC
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Lane) he applies his technocratic approach to preparing the world for
future public health emergencies. That means building early warning
systems that could identify novel illnesses when they first start to
circulate in human populations; developing better treatment and
vaccine technologies that can quickly tackle brand new pathogens; and
optimising processes and building manufacturing facilities that could
quickly mass-produce things like medicines and rapid tests in times of
emergency. At the heart of Gates’s plan is a new institution he
calls Germ (Global Epidemic Response and Mobilisation), composed of a
few thousand experts – from epidemiologists to vaccinologists to
diplomats – who would be on standby in case of a global threat. In
between emergencies, this group would go around the world to
strengthen pandemic-prevention infrastructure and encourage
governments to keep spending on things like disease-monitoring and
scientific research. None of the ideas in the book are radical;
indeed, scientists have been arguing for some version of all them for
several decades. But, given who is making the recommendations, people
with the power to make change might finally listen.

The tail end of the pandemic is also a good time to read BEYOND THE
HYPE
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& Thompson) by Fiona Fox, chief executive of the Science Media Centre
(SMC) in London. This is not a book about new science but the story of
how science’s place in society has changed in the past few decades.
During the early days of Covid-19, the British government made a point
of repeatedly saying that it would “follow the science” when it
came to deciding how to respond. Every day, a cast of experts appeared
on television, radio, Twitter and elsewhere to talk epidemiology,
virology, drug discovery and much more. Things were not always like
this. The fact that scientists have gone from being remote elites in
their ivory towers to accessible experts involved in public
conversations has benefited us all. In her role at the SMC, Fox has
observed this important cultural shift from a ringside seat.

In THIS MORTAL COIL
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Andrew Doig, a biochemist at the University of Manchester, charts the
fascinating history of how humans die. And if you think this might be
a rather morbid topic, worry not. Despite some gruesome descriptions
of disease and death, Doig tells an uplifting tale of how human
ingenuity over the past few thousand years has allowed more of us to
survive, and survive longer – first through innovations such as
farming, and then by applying reason and evidence to health, defeating
a host of major infectious diseases. For most of the history of our
species, life expectancy was around 30. Today – thanks to the
centuries of work by farmers, doctors, public health officials and
others – people can expect to live to at least 70 or 80 in the
world’s most developed nations.

On the morning of 8 October 2013, I was in the newsroom of the
Guardian, continually refreshing a web page with a video stream from
the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Writing the paper’s live blog
for that year’s announcement of the Nobel prize in physics, I
watched as the stated time for the announcement came and went.
In ELUSIVE
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Frank Close, a physicist at the University of Oxford, explains what
Peter Higgs – who would eventually be announced that afternoon as
one of the winners of the physics prize – had been up to while I was
killing time questioning the Royal Swedish Academy’s choice of hold
music
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The attention-shy scientist had purposefully taken himself off-grid by
going for a walk in the Scottish Highlands. He won the Nobel for an
idea that had been published in 1964 – a way to explain why
fundamental particles have mass. Incorporating the famous Higgs boson,
it subsequently became a cornerstone of modern theoretical physics.
Close’s book not only tells the story of how Higgs’s idea came
about but also the decades-long effort to design, build and execute
the vast experiment — the Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Geneva
— that eventually found the boson in 2012.

You had probably never heard the word metaverse before 2021. Today
it’s hard to escape it. For those who want to move past the hype and
understand where the promise of this technology really lies, THE
METAVERSE
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Ball (WW Norton) is the place to start. Ball has worked in the tech
industry and watched the development of 3D virtual worlds in computer
games such as Roblox and Fortnite. He understands the potential for
digital virtual worlds to become useful in other parts of life,
whether through immersive shopping and entertainment, telemedicine or
better remote working. But, crucially, he is no booster for any
particular version of how the metaverse will turn out and is therefore
a rare and invaluable thing – a trusted guide in a world otherwise
riven with self-interest.

Plastic surgery often gets a sniffy dismissal given its close
association with cosmetic procedures to remove wrinkles or resize
bodyparts. But it is better seen as one aspect of a much more
important enterprise born of war; one which seeks to reconstruct
bodies and lives after trauma. In THE FACEMAKER
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Lane), Lindsey Fitzharris, a medical historian, focuses on the work of
Harold Gillies, the doctor who set up Britain’s first maxillofacial
unit and is considered the father of modern plastic surgery. Gillies
worked in the early 20th century and wanted to deal with the
devastating effects of the bombs and guns used in the first world war.
These weapons not only killed millions of people, they maimed hundreds
of thousands more. Doctors had never seen such disfiguring injuries
before and Gillies helped to invent the techniques – reconstructive
surgery, bone and skin grafts – to try to give soldiers back some of
their dignity.

Sticking with human bodies, if you want to know what you are actually
made of, you would do well to consult SONG OF THE CELL
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Siddhartha Mukherjee (Bodley Head). The oncologist and prolific author
looks deep into the biology of human beings to explain what these
basic functional units look like, the myriad ways in which they work
and how scientists, from the 19th century onwards, uncovered all of
that knowledge. Given that all illnesses, from infections to cancer,
involve cells going wrong or being compromised in some way, the quest
to truly understand them is an urgent, ongoing tale.

The information we process through our senses – sight, smell, touch
and the rest – is only a small fraction of what’s going on out
there. In AN IMMENSE
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[[link removed]]WORLD
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Yong widens the sensory window by taking us on a tour of the diverse
ways in which animals perceive things. Bats, famously, “see” by
emitting sound waves and analysing what comes back. Bees can sense
electric fields around flowers and, to their ultraviolet-sensitive
eyes, the blooms look like bullseyes. Birds can detect magnetic fields
and they use that information to guide them on long journeys. Yong’s
colourful, character-filled writing reveals a multidimensional world
that has hitherto remained hidden to us. He also issues a warning –
noise and light pollution in cities, which might be no more than an
annoyance to people, can have much more serious impacts on animals,
inadvertently confounding their delicate sensory worlds and sometimes
leading them into danger.

_ALOK JHA is science correspondent at the Economist. To browse all
science books included in the Guardian and Observer’s best books of
2022 visit guardianbookshop.com
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Delivery charges may apply._

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