That’s Disgusting
Rachel Herz
Casu marzu is made in Sardinia by
adding fly larvae to sheep’s cheese and
allowing the concoction to rot. It is
eaten with thousands of little maggots
still squirming inside it.
Disgusting? Not to the Sardinians
who find it delicious with a nice strong
glass of red wine. And it’s the same
for many other sights, sounds and
smells: What’s disgusting is in the
queasy stomach of the beholder. Herz,
a research psychologist specializing
in the sense of smell, set out to understand the science behind disgust after
being tapped to judge the National Rotten Sneakers Contest in Montpelier,
Vt., and finding it not as bad as she had
expected. She becomes the reader’s
brave guide to all kinds of topics that
are normally avoided.
First Herz surveys what kinds of
things disgust people, and then she
tries to explain why by exploring disgust’s physiological basis (people with
The Forever Fix: Gene Therapy
and the Boy Who Saved It
Ricki Lewis
Gene therapy, long heralded as the sav-
ior of those suffering from rare genetic
disorders, has a lot to thank Corey Haas
for. Haas was 8 years old when, in 2008,
doctors injected engineered viruses
into his eyes in an attempt to cure his
hereditary blindness. It worked, and
that success swept away shadows that
had haunted gene
therapy for nearly
two decades.
Genetics writer
Ricki Lewis uses
Haas’ story to book-
end the checkered
history of gene
therapy — the idea of
replacing a defective gene with a work-
ing one in order to knock out disease. In
theory, it sounds clever. In practice, it
has been fiendishly difficult. Most nota-
bly, 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger died in
a 1999 clinical trial of a gene therapy
damage to some brain areas don’t
feel it, for example) and behavioral
research on how people develop and
respond to disgust.
Disgust is the only basic emotion
that is largely learned (young chil-
dren don’t feel or recognize it), and
Herz argues that it may be the most
recently evolved. Disgust, research sug-
gests, evolved from
fear and took hold
because of its abil-
ity to help protect
people from their
top predators, patho-
gens. From there, it
has been elaborated
upon by associations
and connections in the brain, such that
today all sorts of violations (ketchup on
ice cream) can trigger disgust. But these
feelings can be harnessed, Herz says,
and in the end her lesson on disgust has
a lot to say about how we as humans feel
about ourselves. — Erika Engelhaupt
W. W. Norton & Co., 2012, 274 p., $26.95
treatment for a nonfatal liver disease.
His death temporarily shuddered the
field to a halt. Lewis clearly lays out how
far gene therapy has come since then.
Among other things, scientists have
found better viral vectors to deliver the
new genes, so that the patient’s body
does not go into immune overload.
Much of this progress has been
pushed forward by the anxious parents
of children suffering from rare genetic
disorders such as the brain-destroying
adrenoleukodystrophy best known
from the movie Lorenzo’s Oil. From the
hallways of patient conferences to the
National Institutes of Health library in
Bethesda, Md., Lewis adroitly sketches
the heartbreaking world of families
searching for a cure.
And while her reporting steers clear
of unfounded optimism, her message is
ultimately a positive one: Gene therapy
is here to stay. Soon, Corey Haas, not
Jesse Gelsinger, will be the name most
people remember. — Alexandra Witze
The Life of Super-
Earths
Dimitar Sasselov
The astronomer who
coined the term
“super-Earth” reviews
the hunt for these
possibly life-holding planets. Basic
Books, 2012, 240 p., $25.99
How Not to Be Eaten
Gilbert Waldbauer
Insects’ ingenious
means of avoiding
becoming lunch are
examples of evolution-
ary one-upmanship in
action. Univ. of California, 2012,
221 p., $27.95
Across Atlantic Ice
Dennis J. Stanford and
Bruce A. Bradley
A pair of archae-
ologists explore the
earliest days of the
first humans in North
America and suggest these people
may have had European roots. Univ.
of California, 2012, 336 p., $34.95
Vesuvius
Gillian Darley
This history of the
famous Italian volcano
examines its role as a
cultural icon through
the ages. Harvard
Univ., 2011, 245 p., $22.95
Wired for Culture
Mark Pagel
A biologist examines
the development of
human culture and
argues that evolu-
tionary history has
shaped humankind’s social tenden-
cies. W. W. Norton & Co., 2012,
416 p., $29.95
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visit www.sciencenews.org/bookshelf. A click on
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