I wish this book could have chronicled the progressive triumph of science over superstition and bureaucratic weirdness. Instead, Helen Epstein's, "The Mystery of AIDS in South Africa" shows what happens when a government backs an unproven theory on the cause of HIV infection. Another essay by Robert L. Park offers a scientific (or at least, sane) solution to a fantasy beloved of Americans: "Welcome to Planet Earth" tells the true story of what happened at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 (there actually was a secret government project).

A couple of essays struck me as inspired silliness. Stephen Jay Gould's "Syphilis and the Shepherd of Atlantis" illuminates Fracastoro's Virgilian ode to "Syphilis sive morbus Gallicus," also known as the Spanish Disease, English Disease, Neapolitan Disease, and 'Treponema pallidum.' Andrew Sullivan's "The He Hormone" was not written to be silly--the author was taking testosterone to combat the fatigue of an HIV infection--but it did very much remind me of the crowing scene in "Peter Pan."

In "Running Dry," Jacques Leslie chronicles the unassailable fact that we are running out of fresh water. Although this essay was written in 2000, it seems particularly relevant to this summer of ferocious drought and wildfire. The author develops a somber case against our current dam-building and irrigation processes.

However, "Running Dry" wasn't the book's most shocking essay--at least for me, since I was already aware of the fresh water crisis. The shocker was "The Virus and the Vaccine" by Debbie Bookchin and Jim Schumacher. Anyone who is over the age of forty might want to read this article, which was originally published in "The Atlantic Monthly." Here is why it is so interesting:

"A breakthrough in the war against polio had come in the early 1950s, when Jonas Salk took advantage of a new discovery: monkey kidneys could be used to culture the abundant quantities of polio virus necessary to mass-produce a vaccine. In 1960 Bernice Eddy, a government researcher, discovered that when she injected hamsters with the kidney mixture on which the vaccine was cultured, they developed tumors...The cancer-causing virus was soon isolated by other scientists and dubbed SV40..."

(Incidentally, Bernice Eddy's superiors tried to suppress her discovery. She was eventually demoted and lost her laboratory. But by 1963, laboratories stopped using monkey kidneys to produce polio vaccine.)

The SV40 virus was presumed harmless to humans, and no further investigations were done until 1993 when Michele Carbone, an Italian pathologist, decided to research the origins of mesothelioma, a rare and deadly cancer of the mesothelial cells in the lining of the chest and lung.

Asbestos exposure was linked to mesothelioma, which takes twenty to forty years to develop-- but Dr. Carbone also wondered if the cancer might also be caused by SV40.

Read "The Virus and the Vaccine" to learn the results of Dr. Carbone's research--especially if you were vaccinated for polio between 1955 and 1963. In fact, read all of the articles in this collection. They were written to hold the attention of lay readers like me, and most of them chronicle darn interesting science.