Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Pleasure Shock
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 9/22/1966
WEBSITE: http://www.lonefrank.dk/
CITY: Copenhagen
STATE:
COUNTRY: Denmark
NATIONALITY: Danish
telephone: +45 25 21 32 50
RESEARCHER NOTES:
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| HEADING: | Frank, Lone, 1966- |
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| 100 | 1_ |a Frank, Lone, |d 1966- |
| 670 | __ |a Klonede tigre, 2005: |b t.p. (Lone Frank) inside front cover (b. 1966) |
| 670 | __ |a My beautiful genome, 2011: |b t.p. (Lone Frank) about the author (author of The neurotourist; holds a PhD in neurobiology; previously a research scientist in the biotechnology industry; now a science journalist and television documentary presenter; lives in Copenhagen) |
PERSONAL
Born September 22, 1966.
ADDRESS
CAREER
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to periodicals, including Science, Nature, Nature Biotechnology, Newsweek, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
SIDELIGHTS
Based in Copenhagen, Lone Frank holds a Ph.D. in neurobiology and is a full-time science writer and journalist, and leading speaker about science, technology, and society. She is a staff writer at the Danish newspaper, Weekendavisen, and has written for magazines such as Science, Nature, and Nature Biotechnology. She has also coproduced and hosted science programs for the Danish National Broadcasting Corporation, and has appeared on America’s National Public Radio.
Mindfield and The Neurotourist
In 2009, Frank wrote Mindfield: How Brain Science Is Changing Our World, about the new “neurocentric” revolution which asserts that understanding how the brain works will change what we know about morality, ethics, justice, religion, happiness, and even economics. Neurocentrism examines how the human brain, which weighs only 1300 grams, reveals what it means to be human. Frank interviews neuroscientists and describes her own experiences holding a real brain in her hands. A reviewer in Nature commented that Frank, a science writer, explains complex advances in the field of brain research “for a general audience.”
Frank followed up with The Neurotourist: Postcards from the Edge of Brain Science in 2011. In the book, she explores how science into the brain is reinventing human nature. From information revealed in MRIs and PET scans, to the latest research, including unusual experiments, the brain is the center of human morality, happiness, health, and religion. Frank had her own brain scanned and interviews experts in the field. While the topic is fascinating, “Frank’s treatment does not do it justice,” according to Brandon Robshaw on the Independent website. Robshaw added that she writes in a facetious style that is not funny and underexplores the philosophical questions.
My Beautiful Genome
Frank’s My Beautiful Genome: Exposing Our Genetic Future, One Quirk at a Time, published in 2012, examines how the next century will see a proliferation of consumer-led genomics, from gene-based dating to prenatal genetic testing. Your genetic information can predict which political party you sympathize with, the kind of life partner you’ll choose, and which diseases you are susceptible to. Knowing a person’s DNA can detect serious diseases early and predict chronic anxiety, and tests the idea that biochemistry can determine such things as personality, irritability, and nonconformity. Frank subjected herself to a genomics test and reveals that, rather than be confining or restricting, knowing her genetic profile is reassuring and that “unveiling our ‘invisible self’ liberates,” noted a writer in Nature. She advocates for people learning about their ancestry of diseases and mental illness, behavior, and partner compatibility. “Frank is especially good in constantly questioning how much our genes do, and do not, influence who we are,” according to a contributor to Publishers Weekly.
In addition to knowing our genetic makeup, scientists are exploring epigenetics, which is determining how genes can be tempered by social or environmental factors. Kathy Arsenault commented in Library Journal: “Lay readers will be intrigued by Frank’s witty, engaging account of the possibilities of emerging genetic sciences.” Writing in New Internationalist, reviewers Louise Gray, Malcolm Lewis, and Peter Whittaker called the book highly engaging, praised Frank’s first-person approach, and said that she writes with wit and humor. They added that “her analysis is incisive, shedding some much-needed light on the tired old nature-versus-nurture debate.”
Although genetics tell us much, Frank assures that our genes are not our fate and that we can still make life choices to counter the genetic cards we are dealt. Frank explained to Robert C. Wolcott in an interview on the Forbes website: “If your brain is a physio-chemical system, I would say there isn’t free will. What we feel is our free will feels like it comes out of the blue…It comes from your subconscious.” Frank’s genetic self-examination does not seem self-absorbed, explained Sciences News reviewer Tina Hesman Saey, who added: “Instead, she’s a stand-in, a genetic everyman or everywoman, guiding readers through their own self-discovery.” In a similar account, Tim Radford said online at the Guardian: “All through this highly enjoyable pilgrimage, the message is loud and clear: there may be high hopes, and loud claims, but genetic science is still a work in progress. Inheritance is an influence, it certainly confers probabilities.”
The Pleasure Shock
In 2018, Frank published The Pleasure Shock: The Rise of Deep Brain Stimulation and Its Forgotten Inventor. The book highlights psychiatrist Robert G. Heath’s (1915-1999) controversial experiments at Tulane University into deep brain stimulation (DBS). In the 1950s and 1960s, the work was part of the CIA’s “mind control” project, tested on homosexuals to “cure” them. While Heath’s experiments have been largely forgotten, his groundbreaking work is used in neuroscience today. DBS, called a brain pacemaker by Frank, is an FDA-approved procedure in modern psychiatry in which electrodes are implanted in the brain to stimulate certain areas, to help conditions such as schizophrenia, anorexia, post-traumatic stress, compulsive behavior, Tourette’s, and substance abuse. “A thoughtful, always interesting look into the workings of the mind—and the sometimes—surprising implications of how those workings have been revealed,” noted a writer in Kirkus Reviews. In a review in Booklist, Tony Miksanek said that Frank does a good job of describing Heath’s controversial work and “investigating how science is propelled and complicated by personality, ego, and ambition.”
Some view DBS as a controversial treatment not based on science. Writing in Wall Street Journal, Andrew Scull questions Frank’s suggestion that DBS is based on modern neuroscience, that emotions and cognition can be manipulated, and that the Defense Department is investing tens of millions of dollars in DBS, saying: “No footnotes interrupt her cliché-ridden prose, and extraordinary claims are retailed with no attempt to assess the evidence on which they presumably rest.”
To help lift Heath from his controversial times and status as an ethical villain, Frank acknowledges that he did not have the MRI machine or knowledge of brain chemistry scientists have today. Perhaps Frank is over enthusiastic about DBS’s effectiveness, “What Frank undeniably does get, however, is the difficulty of judging one age by the standards of another and the hard work necessary to balance the moral demands of one good against the moral demands of another. The Pleasure Shock is, for the most part, an adult book—taking a grown-up look at science in both its progressions and regressions,” explained Joseph Bottum online at Washington Free Beacon.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 1, 2018, Tony Miksanek, review of The Pleasure Shock: The Rise of Deep Brain Stimulation and Its Forgotten, p. 10.
Kirkus Reviews, January 15, 2018, review of The Pleasure Shock.
Library Journal, August 1, 2011, Kathy Arsenault, review of My Beautiful Genome: Exposing Our Genetic Future, One Quirk at a Time, p. 114.
Nature, April 30, 2009, review of Mindfield: How Brain Science Is Changing Our World, p. 1110; September 1, 2011, review of My Beautiful Genome, p. 31.
New Internationalist, November 2011, Louise Gray, Malcolm Lewis, and Peter Whittaker, review of My Beautiful Genome, p. 42.
Publishers Weekly, June 6, 2011, review of My Beautiful Genome, p. 32.
Science News, January 28, 2012, Tina Hesman Saey, review My Beautiful Genome, p. 30.
ONLINE
Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/ (March 6, 2018 ), Robert C. Wolcott, “Brain Upgrades, Free Will and Comforting Beliefs: A Conversation with Lone Frank.”
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (November 24, 2012), Tim Radford, review of My Beautiful Genome.
Independent Online, https://www.independent.co.uk/ (July 16, 2011), Brandon Robshaw, review of The Neurotourist: Postcards from the Edge of Brain Science.
Wall Street Journal Online, https://www.wsj.com/articles/ (March 18, 2018), Andrew Scull, review of The Pleasure Shock.
Washington Free Beacon Online, http://freebeacon.com/ (March 24, 2018), Joseph Bottum, review of The Pleasure Shock.
Lone Frank has a shady past as a research scientist with a Ph.D in neurobiology. However, a decade ago she decided to leave the lab bench to become a full-time science writer. Today she is Denmark's most distinguished science writer and a well-known voice in debates about science, technology and society. She writes for the pre-eminent Danish newspaper, Weekendavisen, as well as for publications outside her native country such as Science, Nature and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. She has co-produced and presented several series of science programs on cutting edge science for the Danish National Broadcasting Corporation. Currently, she is making a documentary on the science of happiness and writing her next book.
Lone Frank has appeared on NPR's Leonard Lopate Show and Radio Lab as wells as Wisconsin Public Radio's To the Best of our Knowledge.
Lone Frank
is a journalist and author with a Ph.D. in
neurobiology and a background in research.
As a staff writer at Weekendavisen, Denmark’s leading news paper,
she is Denmark’s most distinguished science writer and a well-known
voice in debates about science, technology and society.
She is widely invited as a public speaker.
Lone Frank has written for leading international publications
such as Science, Nature Biotechnology and Newsweek and regularly
appears as a commentator on Danish radio and television.
In 2007, 2008 and 2011 she presented and co-produced
tv mini-series on controversial science for
the Danish National Broadcasting Corporation, DR.
At present, Lone Frank has published four books:
The New Life (Gyldendal, 2004)
Cloned Tigers (Gyldendal, 2005)
Mindfield (Oneworld, 2009)
My Beautiful Genome (Oneworld, 2011)
All have won critical acclaim and some
have been translated into several languages.
Lone Frank has won several awards for
her writing. She lives in Copenhagen.
Brain Upgrades, Free Will And Comforting Beliefs: A Conversation With Lone Frank
Robert C. Wolcott , Contributor
I explore business, leadership and humanity in our technological age.
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
Lone Frank got tired of killing rats. Following her doctorate in neurobiology, she realized her first love was outside the lab, considering how science and technology might impact our lives.
Frank is now one of Europe’s leading science journalists. Given the magnitude of change underway, her work is essential. From Mindfield and My Beautiful Genome to her recent work on deep brain stimulation, The Pleasure Shock, launching this month, Frank’s work provides insights into our future— ready or not.
On a recent visit to Copenhagen, Lone and I explored topics from Kierkegaard and the Dave Eggers book and recent film, The Circle, to free will-- or lack thereof-- and radical upgrades to our brains. (See our interview here.)
Robin Skjoldborg, 2016
Lone Frank
The Self As An Illusion, Free Will As A Comforting Belief
Most of us believe the notion of a single, sovereign self. It fits day-to-day evidence and nourishes our desire for uniqueness and control. As technology advances this century, our notion of ‘self’ will transform. Even where some religious traditions question this belief (e.g.—Hinduism and Buddhism), the notion of the sovereign self remains operative in daily life.
Neuroscience increasingly suggests otherwise. We don’t just vary between each other, but within ourselves. As US Army Research Lab’s Kaleb McDowell recently remarked, “The state of the brain is changing all the time, more than we expected.” It’s not always clear which ‘individual’ you’re dealing with at any moment. Consider how your decisions and reactions change depending on moods, social settings, illness, any variety of factors.
Decisions as mundane as raising your arm appear to be determined elsewhere in the brain in advance of any conscious decision. Though philosophers like Patricia Churchland suggest we might have degrees of free will, what science makes clear is we have much less of it than generally assumed.
Creative Commons: Vera de Kok
Patricia Churchland at Brainwash Festival 2015
As Frank explains, “If your brain is a physio-chemical system, I would say there isn’t free will. What we feel is our free will feels like it comes out of the blue…. It comes from your subconscious.” Everyone accepts that breathing and heartbeats occur autonomously. Science already validates that many more of our actions, emotions, even beliefs arise with far less conscious deliberation than we appreciate.
Brain Upgrades And The Distributed, Networked Self
Beyond challenging traditional paradigms, science offers the opportunity to prepare for a future already under construction-- a networked existence or “distributed self” in Frank’s words.
Over the past 15 years, social media has provided a portent of what is to come. Online social networks have accelerated from a fringe phenomenon to a transformative force, cited for everything from enabling Arab Spring to derailing US presidential elections.
Public Domain (VOA Photo/L. Bryant)
Protesters march on Avenue Habib Bourguiba in downtown Tunis, 14 Jan 2011
Each of your online identities is another version of you, enmeshed in constantly reforming virtual webs. Individuals have projected multiple identities since well before the Internet—work or home, for instance-- but with digitalization, identities proliferate and re-form within networks at light speed. The individual is never fully in control. Who becomes the real you?
This cognitive and social re-ordering has only just begun. During our interview, Frank proffered, “If you have an invisible interface [to the brain], control might very well come from a machine. If you hack into a human brain, you probably would hack into the subconscious…. You would have no idea if it was you, or somebody else thinking for you.” Fake news, the child of twentieth century propaganda, is a next-generation manifestation of challenges to come.
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Advances in neuroscience, computational and communications technologies offer the opportunity for a “wild upgrade to your brain,” as Frank describes it. Though sensory and cognitive implants appear invasive (they are), they accelerate and intensify processes at work for millennia. Human systems of communication, empathy and collective action evolved as a result of survival benefits. Group intelligence (and stupidity) and the networked self are the latest manifestations.
Enhanced and networked sensory, cognitive and communicative capabilities raise the possibility of societies far different from those of humanity’s first 200,000 years. Imagine the impact of intelligence-to-intelligence (i2i) communications— i.e., telepathy-- on how human beings organize and connect?
What Can We Do? What Should We Do?
Just as plastic surgery began as a response to reconstruction from injuries and expanded to elective, vanity-driven procedures, so too will sensory and cognitive enhancements offer options for upgrades.
I asked Frank about ethical implications. Her answer was pragmatic. “You have this organism here. Let’s optimize it.” She noted that 15 years ago, philosophers argued against cognitive enhancements. Today many are exploring how “to make this the optimal thing to do for society.” As enhancements become reliable and safe (enough), society’s ethical perspectives will likely shift to abhor not upgrading ourselves and our progeny.
What if within a century, as a result of such dramatic changes, we have become a new species? Posing a question Esther Dyson once posed to me, I asked Frank if she was a human patriot. “We are just a snapshot of a species right now. What would be the reason that we should be kept as we are, like an insect in amber? Technology I see as just another step in evolution.”
Photo: Robin Skjoldborg
Lone Frank
Better Lives Through Fiction
Returning to the present, Frank shared one of her missions. As science reveals more about our living systems, individuals and societies have the opportunity to create better lives. To do so, however, requires properly understanding what science is telling us. “The more we know about human nature, the more we can rise above it.”
Science alone isn’t enough. Frank recommends fiction. “I don’t read much nonfiction outside of work. I read fiction. It’s a way of getting closer to human beings.” On this point we passionately agree. No matter how exhaustive our scientific knowledge might become, we’ll never achieve a holistic view of life through science alone.
Though our lives arise from physical, mechanistic systems, we don’t experience them as such. We live as human beings, in all our complex, interrelated, often frustrating, sometimes inspiring ways. Given the hopes and hazards we will face, we need more people like Lone Frank translating our labs to our lives. We’re all better for it.
You can find me at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, and at my foresight and growth consultancy, Clareo.com.
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Lone Frank
Author, My Beautiful Genome
Lone Frank is a journalist with a Ph.D. in neurobiology. A staff writer at Weekendavisen, Denmark?s leading news paper, Frank is also the author of four books including "The Neurotourist: Postcards from the Edge of Brain Science" and "My Beautiful Genome: Exposing Our Genetic Future, One Quirk at a Time."
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Frank, Lone: THE PLEASURE SHOCK
Kirkus Reviews.
(Jan. 15, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Frank, Lone THE PLEASURE SHOCK Dutton (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00 3, 20 ISBN: 978-1-101-98653-0
Science in the service of power can easily be warped and distorted--but, as this book shows, it can sometimes yield unexpected benefits.
Robert G. Heath (1915-1999) was once a widely respected, influential psychiatrist at Tulane University. As neurobiologist-turned-science journalist Frank (My Beautiful Genome: Discovering Our Genetic Future, One Quirk at a Time, 2012, etc.) writes, Heath's biologically oriented work found many acolytes, among them a student who lost his academic chair later in life for having "prescribed too many interesting--and illegal--medications" to the university football team. Some of Heath's work was equally troubling on the ethical front. He likely worked with the CIA on mind control experiments. Moreover, as Frank's book opens, we find him attempting "to convert a homosexual man to heterosexual preferences through brain stimulation," having wired electrodes into the patient's brain's "pleasure center" and hired a female prostitute to effect the conversion. Heath's "brain pacemaker," as he called the electrode device, was applied to dozens of other patients suffering from schizophrenia and depression, a seemingly brutal application save that other remedies were more invasive electroshock treatments and lobotomies. It turns out, writes the author, that although Heath is forgotten or discredited today, he was on to something: what is called "deep brain stimulation" is at the forefront of psychological studies today, with uses that include treating PTSD and traumatic brain injury. Arriving at this conclusion took decades of work in neuroscience, including the ability to study MRI scans of neural centers, among them "brain regions involved with our motivation, our experience of fear, our learning abilities and memory, libido, regulation of sleep, appetite"--in short, activities of interest to industry and government as well as science. Heath's work may then have application after all, writes Frank, even if one psychiatric technician allows along the way that "maybe he shouldn't
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have done that experiment."
A thoughtful, always interesting look into the workings of the mind--and the sometimes- surprising implications of how those workings have been revealed.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Frank, Lone: THE PLEASURE SHOCK." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2018. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A522642893/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=b4fd113c. Accessed 30 May 2018.
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The Pleasure Shock: The Rise of Deep
Brain Stimulation and Its Forgotten
Inventor
Tony Miksanek
Booklist.
114.11 (Feb. 1, 2018): p10. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Pleasure Shock: The Rise of Deep Brain Stimulation and Its Forgotten Inventor. By Lone Frank. Mar. 2018.336p. Dutton, $28 (9781101986530). 616.8.
Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an FDA-approved neurosurgery involving implantation of electrodes that selectively stimulate certain areas of the brain. It's an effective treatment for movement disorders (Parkinson's disease and essential tremor) that do not respond to the usual drug therapies. DBS has also been touted as a possible remedy for some psychiatric conditions, such as OCD and Tourette's. Frank, a PhD neurobiologist and science writer, portrays a DBS pioneer, psychiatrist Robert Heath of Tulane University. Heath began using brain stimulation on patients in the early 1950s for such conditions as schizophrenia, epilepsy, and depression as well as homosexuality. He was particularly interested in manipulating mood. His provocative career presented some serious ethical problems, including novel medical treatment and human experimentation. Nonetheless, the future of DBS looks rosy. In 2013 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) designated $70 million to further develop the technology for possible use in treating traumatic brain injury and other applications. Frank does a solid job of profiling the controversial Heath and investigating how science is propelled and complicated by personality, ego, and ambition.--Tony Miksanek
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Miksanek, Tony. "The Pleasure Shock: The Rise of Deep Brain Stimulation and Its Forgotten
Inventor." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2018, p. 10. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com /apps/doc/A527771729/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=f966cbf1. Accessed 30 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527771729
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The Pleasure Shock: The Rise of Deep
Brain Stimulation and Its Forgotten
Inventor
Publishers Weekly.
265.4 (Jan. 22, 2018): p75+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Pleasure Shock: The Rise of Deep Brain Stimulation and Its Forgotten Inventor
Lone Frank. Dutton, $28 (320p) ISBN 978-1-101-98653-0
Science writer Frank (My Beautiful Genome) takes a deep dive into the work of a controversial "pioneer by accident," psychiatrist Robert G. Heath, whose use of electrode stimulation to the brain's "pleasure center" to treat schizophrenia and depression in the 1950s and '60s horrified and fascinated academia, the CIA, and the U.S. Senate. This wide-ranging, thoughtful exploration of Heath's complicated legacy combs through documents, film footage, and interviews with Heath's colleagues, his son, and a patient. It begins with the treatment of patient B-19, a gay man who was supposed to be cured with electrodes and a prostitute; when Heath died in 1999, his work was largely judged by that perverse episode: "It seems as if he had a vision of something of which he could not clearly see the contours--quite simply because science had not yet reached far enough and the tools were still primitive." Though Heath's work has been discredited, he began an approach that's getting a new look from psychiatry and industry, making one psychosurgeon's assessment particularly poignant: "You are a hero until you are not." Frank has written an excellent, balanced portrait of an inventive psychiatrist with a complicated legacy. Agent: Peter Tallack, the Science Factory. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Pleasure Shock: The Rise of Deep Brain Stimulation and Its Forgotten Inventor." Publishers
Weekly, 22 Jan. 2018, p. 75+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc
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/A525839826/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=827ab60a. Accessed 30 May 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A525839826
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Frank, Lone. My Beautiful Genome:
Discovering Our Genetic Future, One
Quirk at a Time
Kathy Arsenault
Library Journal.
136.13 (Aug. 1, 2011): p114. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2011 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Frank, Lone. My Beautiful Genome: Discovering Our Genetic Future, One Quirk at a Time. Oneworld, dist. by National Bk. Network. Oct. 2011. c.320p, index. ISBN 9781851688333. pap. $15.95. HEALTH
Danish science journalist Frank (Mindfield: How Brain Science Is Changing Our World) introduces readers to the brave new world of "consumer genetics," which comprises services as various as gene-based dating websites, prenatal screening for sex or disabilities, and social networks that allow users to share their personal genetic information with the world. Frank, concerned about a family history of breast cancer, depression, and suicide, writes of her encounters with both European and American companies in her search for clues to her biology and personality. She comes to appreciate the difficulties of using genetic information as a road map to the future and concludes that our genes are not our destiny but only one element that may potentially be manipulated for good or ill. She also discusses the exciting new science of epigenetics, which explores how genes may be tempered by social or environmental factors. VERDICT This work joins Miriam Boleyn-Fitzgerald's Pictures of the Mind as an accessible introduction to this new field of neuroscience. Lay readers will be intrigued by Frank's witty, engaging account of the possibilities of emerging genetic sciences as well as her thoughtful considerations of the philosophical and ethical dimensions of the widespread use of genetic data.--Kathy Arsenault, St. Petersburg, FL
Arsenault, Kathy
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Arsenault, Kathy. "Frank, Lone. My Beautiful Genome: Discovering Our Genetic Future, One
Quirk at a Time." Library Journal, 1 Aug. 2011, p. 114. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A263879431/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=d6a5d0eb. Accessed 30 May 2018.
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Gale Document Number: GALE|A263879431
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My Beautiful Genome
Tina Hesman Saey
Science News.
181.2 (Jan. 28, 2012): p30. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2012 Science News/Society for Science and the Public http://www.sciencenews.org
Full Text:
My Beautiful Genome Lone Frank
Personal genomes, compendiums of a person's entire genetic makeup, are all the rage. Scientists have deciphered the genetic blueprints of thousands of people, with many more to come. And with the completion of these genetic instruction books, narratives about the genomic revolution have not been far behind.
Danish science writer Frank's offering is one of the most readable and fascinating of the bunch. Frank guides readers through various ways genetic information is being used. She explores her own genes, uncovering genetic quirks along the way. She ponders the use of genetic information to reveal ancestry and attempts to answer her own questions about why human beings are entranced by their biological origins.
Frank gives us a glimpse of her medical future as predicted by small variations in the composition of chemical letters within her genome. And yet this self-examination doesn't seem self-absorbed. Instead, she's a stand-in, a genetic everyman or everywoman, guiding readers through their own self-discovery.
Frank even takes up a male coworker's challenge to determine whether he and Frank would produce a genetically optimal child, or if she would be better matched with her boyfriend. Along the way she explores the world of DNA-based dating services and the debatable science on which they are based.
Despite the evidence that Frank presents suggesting that genes control everything from mental states to mate selection, she is careful to point out that "my genes are not fate but cards I've been dealt, and some of those cards give me a certain amount of latitude in playing the game of life." Well played, Ms. Frank.
Oneworld, 2011, 313 p., $15.95
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Please note: Illustration(s) are not available due to copyright restrictions.
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Saey, Tina Hesman. "My Beautiful Genome." Science News, 28 Jan. 2012, p. 30. Book Review
Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A278950422/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=0675da9d. Accessed 30 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A278950422
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My Beautiful Genome Exposing our
Genetic Future, One Quirk at a Time
Louise Gray, Malcolm Lewis and Peter Whittaker
New Internationalist.
.447 (Nov. 2011): p42. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2011 New Internationalist http://www.newint.org
Full Text:
by Lone Frank (Oneworld ISBN 9781851688333) In this highly engaging survey of our human genetic identity, Lone Frank takes as her motto 'The only way to be general is to be deeply personal'. She certainly delivers on that front, submitting herself to a veritable battery of DNA tests and swabs, administered by organizations both academic and commercial, ranging from the highly respected to the borderline bogus. Leading the reader gently through the complex and baffling world of gene mapping, the author shares with us the wonder of the magisterial Human Genome Project, she ponders on the inherited risk of developing breast cancer, and she seeks her 'perfect partner' via genetic matchmaking.
This first-person approach has its dangers Lone Frank has much to say about her bouts of depression, family suicides and her irritable nature and, in less skilled hands, My Beautiful Genome could have descended to the level of 'misery-lit'. However, she writes with wit and good humour and her analysis is incisive, shedding some much-needed light on the tired old nature- versus-nurture debate. I began this book unaware of how little I knew about the science of gene research and I ended it enlightened about the subject, provoked into thought about the underlying philosophy and greatly entertained by the writing.
VERYGOOD PW www.oneworld-publications.com [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
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REVIEWS EDITOR:
Vanessa Baird email: vanessab@newint.org Gray, Louise^Lewis, Malcolm^Whittaker, Peter
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gray, Louise, et al. "My Beautiful Genome Exposing our Genetic Future, One Quirk at a Time."
New Internationalist, Nov. 2011, p. 42. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com /apps/doc/A272491788/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=6ab69f5c. Accessed 30 May 2018.
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My Beautiful Genome: Discovering
Our Genetic Future, One Quirk at a
Time
Publishers Weekly.
258.23 (June 6, 2011): p32. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2011 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
My Beautiful Genome: Discovering Our Genetic Future, One Quirk at a Time
Lone Frank. Oneworld (NBN, dist.), $15.95 trade paper (320p) ISBN 978-1-85168-833-3
As we enter an environment in which many of us will have easy access to the structure of our genome, ethical and scientific questions abound. Frank (Neurotourist: Postcards from the Edge of Brain Science), a science journalist with a doctorate in neurobiology, explores many of these issues in a probing biological memoir that approaches some familiar territory in a refreshing way. On the personal level, she shares her angst as she delves into her genetic composition in an attempt to understand the depression that has afflicted her family for generations. On a broader level, via interviews with leaders in the field, she discusses the ethics of the direct-to-consumer genetic information business and the complex relationship between genes and environment. Frank is especially good in constantly questioning how much our genes do, and do not, influence who we are. What is clear is that access to information is now far greater than a robust understanding of the implications of that information. Frank comes to a wonderfully poetic conclusion about how to balance all of this in her life: "I am what I do with this beautiful information that has flowed through millions of years through billions of organisms and has, now, finally been entrusted to me." (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"My Beautiful Genome: Discovering Our Genetic Future, One Quirk at a Time." Publishers
Weekly, 6 June 2011, p. 32. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc /A258537678/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=c2638866. Accessed 30 May 2018.
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My Beautiful Genome: Discovering
Our Genetic Future, One Quirk at a
Time
Nature.
477.7362 (Sept. 1, 2011): p31. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2011 Nature Publishing Group http://www.nature.com/nature/index.html
Full Text:
My Beautiful Genome: Discovering Our Genetic Future, One Quirk at a Time Lone Frank ONEWORLD 320 pp. 10.99 [pounds sterling] (2011)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
As consumer-led genomics ramps up, questions of ethics and efficacy proliferate. Neurobiologist Lone Frank looks at how exposing our DNA affects our lives. Having interviewed James Watson and covered the rise of personal genomics from 2008, Frank puts her own genes to the test. She charts the range of applications--deep ancestry, disease, behaviour and personality, mental illness and partner compatibility--and concludes that, far from being a straitjacket, unveiling our 'invisible self' liberates, connects and reassures.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"My Beautiful Genome: Discovering Our Genetic Future, One Quirk at a Time." Nature, vol.
477, no. 7362, 2011, p. 31. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc /A267134648/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=b5ab7016. Accessed 30 May 2018.
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Mindfield: How Brain Science is Changing Our World
Nature.
458.7242 (Apr. 30, 2009): p1110. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2009 Nature Publishing Group http://www.nature.com/nature/index.html
Full Text:
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Mindfield: How Brain Science is Changing Our World
by Lone Frank
(Oneworld, $16.95)
Lone Frank asks how neuroscience is transforming our society. By describing her own experiences while researching the book--from holding half a real brain in her hands to talking with leading scientists--she explains advances in the field for a general audience.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Mindfield: How Brain Science is Changing Our World." Nature, vol. 458, no. 7242, 2009, p.
1110. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A199584345 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=340b6dfe. Accessed 30 May 2018.
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Book review: My Beautiful Genome
To my mother, there were two kinds of people: blood relatives and strangers. It's hard to imagine what she would have made of today's genetic testing, which shows, among other things, the complex and convoluted ways an African-American may be descended from a white Scot, and that all the many Cohens in the world may be related.
Book Reviews
By Book Reviews for ZDNet UK Book Reviews | September 19, 2011 -- 13:35 GMT (06:35 PDT) | Topic: Reviews
To my mother, there were two kinds of people: blood relatives and strangers. It's hard to imagine what she would have made of today's genetic testing, which shows, among other things, the complex and convoluted ways an African-American may be descended from a white Scot, and that all the many Cohens in the world may be related. She was related to far more people than she ever would have been willing to accept as family.
For the Danish science writer and trained neurobiologist Lone Frank, the journey into her genetic code began with an event that comes to all of us who do not die young: she became an orphan. If you have siblings, when your parents die you still feel surrounded by the demands of genetics. But Frank, then 43, is a childless only child and the moment left her cold, alone, and asking all the usual human existential questions. A generation earlier she might have turned to philosophy. Instead, in a pattern she believes is a developing trend that's fundamentally changing our society's approach to these questions, she headed for biology. And so, a year later, she began the search for herself as part of a research project studying the links between specific genes and depression.
That was only the beginning. In the course of researching My Beautiful Genome: Exposing Our Genetic Future, OneQuirk at a Time, the first-person tale of that physical and biological search, Frank peered into the connections between genes and brain function, psychology, behaviour and physiognomy. She journeys to Cold Spring Harbor, NY to interview 83-year-old James Watson, to Iceland to meet deCODEme's founder and CEO, Kári Stefánsson, and Richmond, Virginia to meet epidemiologist Kenneth Kendler, among others. Each encounter gives her new insights into the possibilities of personal genomics.
But each interviewee also teaches her the limits to genetic determinism. How our genes determine ourselves is not so simple; nor is understanding the interplay between them and our environment. But she learns this and finds it comforting: while her parents were giving her the genes for depression, they were also giving her the warmly connected childhood to combat it. It isn't so easy to blame our genes for everything that's wrong with us: they are malleable. 'Nobody's perfect' is exactly right.
Many of the issues Frank examines have been predicted — in Tom Wilkie's 1994 book Perilous Knowledge, written as the Human Genome Project was just getting underway, for example. But Frank is writing from experience; they are no longer theoretical. The movie Gattaca beckons as she discusses the level of genetic flaws we will accept in an unborn child with Imperial College evolutionary biologist Armand Leroi (with whom she appeared recently at the Dana Centre.
My Beautiful Genome is the best kind of science book: Frank's personal interest in her subject, her self-deprecating humour and her ability to explain complex concepts clearly make it compelling. In the end, like the folk songwriter Si Kahn, she concludes that it isn't what you're born with — it's what you do with what you've got.
My Beautiful Genome: Exposing Our Genetic Future, OneQuirk at a Time By Lone Frank One World Publications 314pp ISBN: 978-1-85168-833-3 £10.99
Wendy M Grossman
My Beautiful Genome: exposing our genetic future, one quirk at a time – review
Lone Frank, on a mission to discover what makes an identity, decides that her genes are not necessarily her fate
The Science Book Club is now reading The Malay Archipelago by Alfred Russel Wallace, which Tim will review on Friday 11 January
Tim Radford
Sat 24 Nov 2012 02.00 EST
First published on Sat 24 Nov 2012 02.00 EST
Young people in Copenhagen
Frank is a member of Haplogroup I1, a lineage that exists pretty much only in Europe, where it arose 28,000 years ago. Basically, she has discovered she is Scandinavian. Photograph: Yadid Levy/Alamy
Lone Frank is self-obsessed, in a generous way. She is on a mission to discover what makes an identity, a life trajectory, a career choice, a social animal. There is just one identity she can describe without fear of contradiction. The key is her genome. So think of her as a pioneer, on a journey deeper into the self, on behalf of all of us.
Her journey starts in the usual way: with her parents, each of whom contributed to the making of half of the Lone Frank whose testimony we hold in our hands; with an encounter with James Watson, one half of the double act that fingered DNA as the carrier of the genetic code; with old-fashioned family tradition genealogy and the new genetic markers that identify the remote origins of a lineage.
This Danish journalist – the book is a translation – sets out to ask questions and challenge presumptions. She takes the swab and gets the results. She and her brother (she needs him for the Y chromosome) are members of Haplogroup I1, a lineage that exists pretty much only in Europe, where it arose 28,000 years ago. Basically, she has discovered she is Scandinavian. But her own mitochondrial DNA (and therefore his) belongs to Haplogroup2a1, with mutations that tell a story of beginnings in the Middle East and the Caucasus region 10,000 years ago.
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She has her genome tested by deCODE, in Iceland, and contemplates her single nucleotide polymorphisms – the SNPs or tiny mutations in specific genes – that can tell her something about the relative risk of chronic lymphocytic leukaemia, age-related macular degeneration, Alzheimer's (all cheerful news) and peripheral arterial disease (not so good) and breast cancer (much better). She goes to Reykjavik to confront deCODE's confrontational director and founder Kári Stefánsson ("Are you really going to burden me with your company once again?"). He made business history by trying to market Iceland as one big genetic research package: he hoped the pairing of personal DNA and meticulous family histories together would surely deliver real information that modern medicine could exploit. She meets one of the women behind 23andMe in the US and hears their principal scientist announce the latest discoveries from research into volunteers: two SNPs strongly associated with curly hair, a single SNP linked to the sneeze reflex in strong light, and an SNP that increases the risk that you will not be able to detect in your own urine the smell of the asparagus you have eaten.
She contemplates the chemistry of depression – and a family history of it – and ticks off the genes that influence personality: she has a double dose of the "worrier" variation, and she is saddled with two copies of a variant that notoriously guarantees psychological vulnerability and a tendency to depression. As an antidote, she takes us through the ups and downs of research into genetic variation: findings from one population sample can spell one clear message, and fail to spell anything of the kind in another epidemiological study. She tests the new commercial market in biological compatibility, based on HLA or human leukocyte antigen genes, to be told that she and her boyfriend are a good match, but that one of her own colleagues would be a perfect match ("At least, there would be a good chance for a successful pregnancy").
All through this highly enjoyable pilgrimage, the message is loud and clear: there may be high hopes, and loud claims, but genetic science is still a work in progress. Inheritance is an influence, it certainly confers probabilities. But her genes, she decides in the last pages, are not her fate but cards that have been dealt for her to play. It is information she can work with – and she has done just that, coolly and stylishly.
Tim Radford's The Address Book: Our Place in the Scheme of Things (Fourth Estate) was briefly longlisted for the Royal Society Winton Science Book prize.
The Science Book Club is now reading The Malay Archipelago by Alfred Russel Wallace, which Tim will review on Friday 11 January
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My Beautiful Genome
Science writer Lone Frank gets up close and personal with her genetic code
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Review by Clive Cookson September 2, 2011
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A decade or so after scientists triumphantly revealed a first draft of the human genome, the 3bn biochemical letters that make up our DNA, the script is turning out to be far harder to decipher – and therefore to use – than the enthusiasts led us to believe.
But the huge research effort to understand the complexity of the genome is throwing up new insights into the nature of humanity, as the Danish science writer Lone Frank shows in My Beautiful Genome, her excellent look into the postgenomic world. To illustrate the issues, she takes the ultra-personal route of undergoing as much genetic testing as she can. This technique worked well for Masha Gessen in Blood Matters (2008) and David Ewing Duncan in Experimental Man (2009), and it succeeds for Frank too.
The era of consumer genetics, which moved testing beyond specialist laboratories into the mass market, began three or four years ago when companies such as deCODEme and 23andMe launched personal gene profiling services.
Frank explains their limitations well. For a start, the companies only decode less than one-thousandth of the genome, focusing on the mutations in individual letters of the genetic code known as SNPs (usually pronounced “snips”, which stands for single nucleotide polymorphisms).
Consumer-oriented tests scan about a million SNPs looking for variants that scientists have shown to be linked to disease, usually through research projects that compare the genomes of patients with a control group of non-sufferers. As Frank discovers when she undergoes a SNP scan from deCODEme – and as I have found myself – the results are generally reassuring. For the most dreaded genes, those that predispose to Alzheimer’s, her results are “outright fantastic”.
But Frank is not satisfied with mere SNPs. She wants to have her full genome read but this is still at the research stage and would cost thousands of dollars, compared with a few hundred for a SNP scan – if she could find a lab to do it. And many experts believe that existing knowledge of the links between genes and disease lies mainly in SNPs, with little extra insight to be gained from the rest of the genome.
So she moves on to more specialised tests for conditions that she knows run in her family, such as mental illness and breast cancer. However, Frank fails to pick up any conclusive information – demonstrating the limitations of genetics rather than her failure as an investigative writer. In the process she has fascinating discussions with several of the world’s leading geneticists and offers sharp and colourful observations.
Frank can also be devastating about herself, as when she undergoes personality tests and is told: “Your agreeableness couldn’t be lower ... Then there is your low score on altruism and sympathy.” I do not know whether Frank is really disagreeable and unsympathetic but, given the underlying warmth of her writing, I doubt it.
The conclusion summarises beautifully the latest evidence about the malleability of our DNA in response to social and environmental circumstances. “My genome is not a straitjacket but a soft sweater to fill and shape, to snuggle up and stretch out in,” Frank writes. “So who am I? I am what I do with this beautiful information that has flowed through millions of years through billions of organisms and has, now, finally been entrusted to me.”
Clive Cookson is the FT’s science editor
My Beautiful Genome: Exposing Our Genetic Future, One Quirk at a Time, by Lone Frank, Oneworld, RRP£10.99, 312 pages
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2018. All rights reserved.
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Lone Frank’s “Beautiful Genome”
October 5, 2011 By ScottH under recommended reading
Lone Frank, the award-winning Danish science writer, claims to be shy, but I don’t believe her. There’s nothing reserved about exposing yourself as she’s done in her entertaining and enlightening new book My Beautiful Genome: Discovering Our Genetic Future One Quirk at a Time. (Oneworld Publications, October 2011.) Frank bears all in a book that is at once about cutting edge genetic science and also about someone on a personal journey of discovery. “What is the most interesting subject in the world?” Frank asks. “For all of us, it’s the same thing – ourselves. Me.” But Frank, who has a Ph.D in neurobiology, isn’t navel gazing here. She uses herself and her “quirks” to delve into the scientific as well as social implications of people having access to their own genetic data. She thinks it’s a good thing, and although this book is about her, Frank is really asking much broader questions. “The past, in its way, was gone. And the future – well, you could see an end to it,” Frank writes. “At forty-three, I’d reached the age when the chance of having children was pretty much theoretical.” And at this point in her life, she has questions: “Where do I come from? Who am I? Am I going to be like my parents? How will I die? And when?” Not shallow inquiries at all. Inquiries like these have driven other great scientific pursuits. As the renowned Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins recently told the New York Times, these are the questions that fuel his work. “My interest in biology was pretty much always on the philosophical side. ‘Why do we exist, why are we here, what is it all about?'” Framing her own journey, Frank begins her book with a quote from Danish artist Asger Jorn – “The only way to be general is to be deeply personal.” That’s what she’s done here.
During a call from her home in Denmark, Lone Frank provided the Blog with a few tidbits about her new book My Beautiful Genome. Frank believes we’re at the dawning of the age of personal genomics. It’s a time that’s not too different from the moment just before the personal computer revolution began 30 years ago. “I think what’s most useful is just getting on the bandwagon and becoming engaged with your biology,” Frank said of genetic testing. “You learn so much more about who you are.” There’s no doubt from her book that she’s all in on the idea. The process of looking into her genetics made her “more present in my biology” or simply put – more attuned to her body. Your genetics are actually malleable, she said. For Frank this was particularly relevant because of her bouts of depression. “It turns out I’m homozygous for all the bad variants, which makes a lot of sense,” said Frank. “But you can turn that around. When I know this is a biological disposition it’s easier to understand and I can use it to distance myself from stuff when I’m going down that black hole.” Some tend to see genes as a set of fixed instructions. But those instructions and how a gene is expressed — turned on or off — are influenced by everything from nutrition, stress, hormones and environmental exposures. “It’s like the black box is getting opened and you’re seeing how your genes and the environment determine whether you get a disease or not,” Frank said.
One reviewer called Frank’s book a bit “masochistic” for her frankness about her bouts of depression, her family’s history of suicides and her own psyche. But there’s a purpose to her over-sharing. In a world where consumers are increasingly getting access to their own genetic data, Frank turns to genetics for answers about her ancestry, her traits and her risks for diseases. And she uses it to delve into difficult questions about her prickly personality. In one of the many wry and offhand comments in the book she responds to a researcher’s insight into her harsh judgment of others with the thought, “Give me a break. Doesn’t the man realize how stupid other people can be?” The book tracks both a personal and a physical journey. As any good journalist would, Frank travels to the source, manifested here by visiting genetics pioneer James Watson at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Watson, who with Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA, has his own personality “quirks”, highlighted publicly through some boorish opinions about women, Africans and overweight people. But Frank bypasses this for a chance to get some insight from him about where the study of genetics is going. Watson sends her off with two ideas: that “missing heritability” – the Holy Grail of genetics – will be found in rare genetic variants that arise not from the genes you inherit from your parents but through mutations that arise through illnesses and environmental factors; and that “If you want to know something about your genome, you have to have a lot of eyes on it.” Frank takes this last bit of advice to heart. She uses several direct-to-consumer genetics services to learn about her ancestry, health and traits. She meets with a series of innovators in the personal genomics industry. There’s a conversation with 23andMe co-founder Linda Avey, and deCODE Genetics’s Kari Stefansson. She gets some time with Harvard’s George Church of the Personal Genome Project and Spencer Wells of the National Geographic Society’s “Genographic Project.” Frank also submits to a study by University of Copenhagen researchers doing experimental work about the genetics around personality. For Frank it isn’t pretty. “Your agreeableness couldn’t be lower,” they conclude. “Then there is your low score on altruism and sympathy.” She talks to researchers using genetics to determine the effectiveness of medicines, and delves into whether her Danish ancestry might include a long lost Spaniard. She learns of her risks for breast cancer and peripheral arterial disease. And she dives into how her genetics may influence her propensity toward depression. In the end Frank finds the process freeing. Genetics isn’t her destiny, she says. “My genome is not a straitjacket but a soft sweater to fill and shape, to snuggle up and stretch out in,” Frank says. “So who am I? I am what I do with this beautiful information that has flowed through millions of years through billions of organisms and has, now, finally been entrusted to me.”
Tags: depression, direct-to-consumer, genetics
Stimulating Mind and Morals
Review: 'The Pleasure Shock' by Lone Frank
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BY: Joseph Bottum
March 24, 2018 5:00 am
Scientific progress "can be made only through research that is scrupulously ethical," Nature magazine declared this spring. And why not? It's a sweet thought, a pious thought in the church of right feeling: a sentimental dogma that all good things must cohere because, dammit, they're all good, aren't they?
It's also nutty as the day is long. Inaccurate historically, the claim cannot account for, say, the current campaign to have a statue of J. Marion Sims removed from New York's Academy of Medicine, because the 19th-century doctor, undeniably the founder of modern gynecology, honed his surgical techniques by operating on slaves. If biology had made no advance from its indiscriminate slaughter of animals, then we would still be doing medicine in the mode of Galen and the Ancient Greeks.
Perhaps even more important, the notion that ethical research alone can contribute to scientific progress is juvenile, down in its essence. Make no mistake: Anyone of any moral sense should agree to the banning of unethical research—even while we should possess a kind of broad-shouldered historical sense that different ages hold different ideas about what constitutes the ethical and the unethical. Think, for example, of the Resurrection Men of the early 1800s who horrified Great Britain and the United States by digging up corpses to provide medical schools with cadavers for training young doctors. Desecration of corpses is surely bad, but, just as surely, medical training is good.
And that's the point. The notion that all goods easily fit together is infantile: a child's view of the modern world. It hides behind a gauzy curtain the complexities of adult understanding, and it cheapens ethics—for it asserts that ethical behavior costs nothing. If we give up nothing to be good, then who would not be good? If scientific progress happens only through "scrupulously ethical" research, then why would anyone pursue science down dark paths?
To see the mutual incompatibility of modern goods, we could go back to Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Island of Doctor Moreau, that triumvirate of English literature's classic 19th-century novels about the mad hubris of scientists. Or we could simply take a look at The Pleasure Shock: The Rise of Deep Brain Stimulation and Its Forgotten Inventor, the latest book from the successful Danish science writer, Lone Frank.
For all that the 19th century worried about those who put scientific progress above all other goods, the real moment of cultural belief in science came after the Second World War. From the military-industrial complex that would come to worry Eisenhower in the United States to the Sputnik and atom-bomb efforts of the Soviets, technology seemed to be booming. The bizarre power wielded by Trofim Lysenko in Russia helped keep the Communist Bloc behind in biology, but new biological understandings seemed to be flooding the Western democracies.
Frank asks us to witness the work of Robert G. Heath at Tulane University, down in New Orleans. Born in 1915, Heath was an enormously successful American academic scientist. A huge river of money for scientific research was pouring from the government to the universities from the late 1940s through the 1960s, and Heath became a conduit for a good portion of that money, even though his discipline was psychiatry.
He was a psychiatrist, however, during an age dominated by the materialism that equated the physical brain with the immaterial mind. He was a psychiatrist, moreover, in the days when there existed no clear ethical boundaries to research. He lived, in other words, in a moment in which it seemed reasonable for scientists to say—to their fellow scientists, their universities, and the government—that scientific progress was so vitally important that all other moral considerations needed to be set aside.
In The Pleasure Shock, Lone Frank opens with a picture of Heath's experiments in sexual orientation, as he tried to change same-sex desire into heterosexuality. In truth, the experiments were more than a little peculiar. For example, Heath ran electrical wires, his "brain pacemaker," to the head of Patient B-12, and then hired a prostitute to seduce the man while Heath electrically stimulated his "pleasure center." Still, Frank's initial use of the incident doesn't inspire confidence in her analysis, for the Freudian era in which Heath worked would have taken as highly moral, highly praiseworthy, the curing of what it understood as the less-than-adult sexual desire of homosexuality. It's impossible to imagine a set of ethical guidelines in the 1950s that would have taken that particular experiment as the absolute model of unethical research.
Unethical means? Sure. Anybody who has to hire a prostitute to help carry out his research is clearly racing toward the boundaries. But an unethical goal, as well? That is the judgment of a later age.
As she proceeds in her narrative, however, Frank proves nuanced and thoughtful about the sorts of cultural changes that have left Heath as the villain in a morality tale, where he is remembered at all. "You are a hero until you are not," she quotes from another scientist, and Heath's once powerful legacy as a psychiatric researcher at Tulane is now taken as a best-forgotten shame for the man's discipline and his university.
As perhaps they ought to be. Heath's interest through the 1950s and 1960s was in the effect of electrically stimulating sections of the brain, which he thought would be a means of treating both epilepsy and schizophrenia—the physiological and psychological dysfunctions of the brain. A version of Heath's work can be seen in the 1972 Terminal Man, the second of Michael Crichton's enormously popular science novels. Before his death in 2008, Crichton would call the book his least favorite of his novels, probably because the science of electric brain stimulation seemed to have led nowhere, however plausible Robert G. Heath had made it seem at the time.
And yet, here in 2018, Lone Frank thinks that perhaps the effect is not so far-fetched, as recent explorations of "deep brain stimulation" have made Heath begin to seem a "pioneer by accident." The scientist failed, in her view, mostly because he lacked what decades of research would later bring: a sufficient mapping of the brain and a clearer understanding of mental chemistry. "He had a vision of something of which he could not clearly see the contours," she writes, "quite simply because science had not yet reached far enough and the tools were still primitive." In particular, Heath lacked MRI technology to scan "brain regions involved with our motivation, our experience of fear, our learning abilities and memory." Now that we have such understandings and tools, we can advance much further than Heath did with his nearly random firing of little electric jolts in the thalamus and cerebellum.
Well, maybe. Frank's account of recent work in deep brain stimulation has more than a little of the rah-rah about it—the same enthusiasm for the latest psychiatric trends that led Michael Crichton to write about Heath's primitive style of electric manipulation back in 1972.
What Frank undeniably does get, however, is the difficulty of judging one age by the standards of another and the hard work necessary to balance the moral demands of one good against the moral demands of another. The Pleasure Shock is, for the most part, an adult book—taking a grown-up look at science in both its progressions and regressions.
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Joseph Bottum
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Joseph Bottum is a professor of cyber-ethics and director of the Classics Institute at Dakota State University. His most recent book is An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America.
‘The Pleasure Shock’ Review: This Is Your Brain On Batteries
The book’s author credulously believes that ‘brain pacemakers’ could jolt us into becoming happy, sober and thin. Andrew Scull reviews ‘The Pleasure Shock’ by Lone Frank.
By Andrew Scull
March 18, 2018 2:22 p.m. ET
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For much of the 20th century, those suffering from major mental illnesses were locked up in institutions that deliberately isolated them from society. Their pain and suffering were immense. As wards of the state, they were an enormous burden on the public purse.
Dr. Robert G. Heath in 1966.
Dr. Robert G. Heath in 1966. Photo: Associated Press
The pressures on psychiatrists to do something about mental conditions they understood poorly, if at all, were thus correspondingly great, and the restraints on some professionals’ zeal for therapeutic experimentation largely absent. Hence the host of desperate remedies aimed at these illnesses. There were programs to induce fevers by infecting patients with malaria, or to induce meningitis by injecting horse serum into their spinal canals; there was the surgical removal of teeth and tonsils, followed by the evisceration of stomachs, spleens, cervixes and colons; there was the induction of artificial epileptic seizures, first with drugs, then with electricity passed through the brain; and, most dramatically, there was the severing of brain tissue, either through surgical operations on the frontal lobes or by thrusting an ice pick through the eye socket—so-called transorbital lobotomies.
Lone Frank’s “The Pleasure Shock: The Rise of Deep Brain Stimulation and Its Forgotten Inventor” focuses on Robert G. Heath (1915-99), a neurosurgeon who first studied, then abandoned, a form of lobotomy known as a topectomy, which extracted cubes of tissue from the frontal lobes. Instead, Heath pursued the novel idea that electric currents sent from a battery inserted in a patient’s chest to electrodes implanted in the brain could be used to modify the patient’s brain activity. Trained in both neurology and psychiatry, Heath left a promising career at Columbia University for the delights of Louisiana at the end of the 1940s, before topectomies proved disastrously ineffective. His position at Tulane University gave him unfettered access to patients at one of the country’s most backward state hospitals and to inmates at one of the nation’s most notoriously harsh penitentiaries—subjects on which he could test his new ideas.
Ms. Frank, a science writer whose previous book was “The Neurotourist: Postcards From the Edge of Brain Science” (2011), considers Heath a misunderstood and tragically neglected genius, the unacknowledged pioneer who invented techniques of deep-brain stimulation that now (at least on the author’s account) promise to bring effective therapeutic interventions to a host of psychiatric conditions: anorexia, autism, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, PTSD, schizophrenia, Tourette syndrome, even alcoholism, heroin addiction and gluttony. (Heath also tried it as a remedy for homosexuality.) Ms. Frank suggests that brain pacemakers, as she calls these devices, are based on the most advanced findings of modern neuroscience and could potentially usher in a new era in which emotions and cognition can be massaged and manipulated to create blissful mental outcomes.
‘The Pleasure Shock’ Review: This Is Your Brain On Batteries
Photo: WSJ
The Pleasure Shock
By Lone Frank
(Dutton, 305 pages, $28)
To Ms. Frank, Heath was “dapper,” “charming,” “tough as nails,” “bubbling with ideas,” “a gifted, curious scientist”—anything but the monster some of his contemporaries believed him to be. Ethical objections to his cavalier experiments or concerns about the purely speculative basis of his dangerous interventions, Ms. Frank seems to think, can safely be set aside. His “project itself was not objectionable, and his line of investigation has reappeared, riding a wave of great enthusiasm.” (Ms. Frank’s emphasis.) She suggests that one of Heath’s wilder claims—to have discovered a protein in the blood of schizophrenics that interfered with the transfer of information in certain brain cells—might represent “something real.” This, even though she acknowledges that the “biochemist” Heath had hired to perform the underlying “science” turned out to be a fraud bereft of scientific training, and a mobster besides.
“The Pleasure Shock” weaves back and forth between the quarter-century of Heath’s uncontrolled experiments at Tulane and a breathless account of 21st-century experiments with deep-brain stimulation. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, she tells us, is investing $70 million in deep-brain stimulation, paralleling the CIA’s earlier involvement in Heath’s work. Harvard psychiatrists funded by Darpa boast of working on “a little computer that could be integrated into the human brain and connected directly to nerve tissue in order to keep the organ on the path of the straight and narrow.” No footnotes interrupt her cliché-ridden prose, and extraordinary claims are retailed with no attempt to assess the evidence on which they presumably rest.
Ms. Frank occasionally acknowledges that modern deep-brain stimulation has its critics. A neurosurgeon at University College London says that “history is repeating itself. The only difference from [Heath’s work] and now is that the tools are more sophisticated. Otherwise, it is the same conduct as before.” An ethicist at the University of Tasmania condemns the “thoroughly uncritical” coverage of deep-brain stimulation by science journalists—he might have had Ms. Frank in mind—and tells her that “it is disturbingly reminiscent of the original coverage of lobotomies.” In passing, the author mentions that the two major controlled studies to date on deep-brain stimulation have failed to show that it produces better results than a placebo. One of the trials had such discouraging results that it was aborted midstream.
But soon Ms. Frank is back in her speculative science-fiction world. Brain pacemakers to adjust emotions and cognition are, she believes, the wave of the future: “I think it is likely that stimulation will develop from an experimental to a routine treatment. Not just because the techniques and the tools are better than before [Ms. Frank’s emphasis], but because the spirit of the times is completely different.” Credulity is a wonderful thing.
Mr. Scull is the author of “Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, From the Bible to Freud, From the Madhouse to Modern Medicine.”
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The Neurotourist: Postcards from the Edge of Brain Science, By Lone Frank
Philosophy? Politics? It’s all in the mind
Reviewed by Brandon Robshaw
Saturday 16 July 2011 23:00 BST
0 comments
Lone Frank is a journalist and science writer with a PhD in neurobiology, so she ought to be just the person to explain how advances in neuroscience are going to annex territory previously held by philosophers, and help to explain ethics, religion, happiness, politics, the self and the mind.
It's a fascinating subject, but Frank's treatment does not do it justice. She interviews various experts about what shows up on their EEG and PET scanners, writing in a facetious style which never quite succeeds in being funny, while the philosophical questions are under-explored. I did, however, enjoy learning that Frank has "a cute Corpus callosum".
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