Enough with the cranes already! Richard Powers’s 2006 novel The Echo Maker, a National Book Award winner, is a great book to take to the beach (or the bench while the PCR machine is running), even if it is about 100 pages too long.

The Echo Maker follows Mark Schluter’s recovery from a mysterious car accident that leaves him with Capgras syndrome, the delusion that one’s loved ones have been replaced by imposters. His sister Karin calls in a celebrity neuroscientist, the Oliver Sacks-ish Dr. Gerald Weber, and all three struggle with issues of identity and self. Oh, and there are also those blasted cranes, who pass through this book far more frequently than they do the Nebraska Platte described in the novel.

Capgras is a fascinating disorder worthy of fiction and nonfiction alike. Ramachandran describes Capgras, in which familiar faces fail to illicit proper emotional responses, as the mirror to prosapagnosia, the inability to recognize faces. He has suggested that injury-induced Capgras (approximately 33% of all Capgras cases) may be caused by lesions of the connections between the inferior temporal cortex and the amygdala. Capgras patients, unlike people with amygdala lesions, show elevated galvanic skin responses to emotional stimuli, but not to pictures of people they know, suggesting that it’s not the amygdala itself that is affected, but the information flow to the amygdala from the visual cortex.

Like Ramachandran’s case study D. S. (not me, I swear), Mark Schluter doubles himself, describing his pre-injury self as ‘old Mark’, someone who looks very much like the person he used to be. Powers sprinkles references to 9/11 throughout The Echo Maker, perhaps implying that we are all quite different than the people we used to be. A point very elegantly made, but one that used way too many birds in the making.

TV’s Mr. Wizard, Don Herbert, died yesterday. He was the first (and favorite) science teacher for several generations of children. He will be greatly missed.

“One is 95 percent certainty, and the other is…50 percent and a feather”

According to attorney Kevin Conway (quoted in the Washington Post), that is the difference between the scientific and legal burden of proof that autism is related to childhood vaccines. Conway represents one of more than 4800 families who believe that a vaccine preservative caused autism in their loved ones and are suing for compensation from the Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund. The first test case is before the U. S. Court of Federal Claims today.

An editorial in the May issue described the lack of scientific data supporting this claim. However, the timing of this hearing is particularly interesting. Just days ago, the media generated a frenzy over Andrew Speaker, the American lawyer with a drug resistant form of tuberculosis who flew on commercial airplanes. Perhaps because vaccines have worked so well in combating diseases like polio, many in the west have been lulled into a false sense of security when it comes to diseases that are common in ‘the rest of the world’. The court should certainly weigh the global health impact of a generation of American children who are not vaccinated. Conversely, we must continue to ensure that despite our hysteria over modern health threats, like small pox and avian flu, vaccine companies test and retest their products (and publish their data!) before rushing them out to nervous consumers.

The Post points out the biggest losers in the autism court battle: autistic children. Although my heart goes out to the plaintiffs in this case, one has to wonder what therapies and services could be purchased for the price of the legal blame game.

If you could look into a crystal ball to find out how your life ends, would you? Yesterday, James Watson (yes, that James Watson) decided that he didn’t want to know. His personal genome was sequenced by 454 Life Sciences and the Human Genome Sequencing Center at the Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Watson will make his entire genome publicly available with the exception of one gene: apolipoprotein E, the gene most strongly associated with Alzheimer’s disease, which killed his grandmother.

There is no correct answer to the genetic testing dilemma. The children and grandchildren of victims of diseases with much clearer genetic causes have struggled with this question for years. But if Watson’s genome announces the dawn of pharmacogenomics, many more of us will have to decide for ourselves what we do and what we don’t want to know.

Watson is not a man who shies away from controversy. Perhaps that is why I am slightly surprised by such a human decision from such a brazen pioneer.