Erbe: Tutta La Verità: Conoscerne I Benefici, Evitarne I Rischi

by Holly Phaneuf

543 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

I’ve loved working as a scientist and biochemistry professor. My PhD in medicinal chemistry (drug design) and BS degrees in biology and chemistry are from the University of Utah.

In 2005, I combined my love of plants and molecules and wrote Herbs Demystified. It needs updating!

But that’s how science works! I love how science can course correct what we think we know. Italian and Mandarin editions exist which I can’t read.

I’m a grad student again, in biotechnology at the University of Wisconsin. I don’t need another degree. I want to make meaningful connections and to try to be more useful while I see science under the greatest attack of my lifetime. I’m turning 60 soon, and worry about being more useful.

Mostly I help my husband manage our businesses. Tim's a mechanical engineer with over seventy patents, mainly, medical devices. We're branching out trying to limit AI scraping and unwanted advertising.

Tim's Maffle (My Ad Free Life) patent, newly issued by the US patent office (YAY!), bypasses advertising and protects users from AI scraping. We are working to figure out how to best launch that.

I’m obsessed with journaling and am an active member of Write On Door County. I blog about science, writing, and being an easily-overstimulated person with a sensory condition called synesthesia. (HP Erskine on Substack).

I also share what I’ve learned caregiving for my mom, who had Alzheimer’s. I lead sing-a-longs for eldercare and play my harp in hospice. I love composing! Creating songs is like shaping stories. Using our home recording studio, I'm getting pieces mastered for my first album.

Making a movie—something I never expected to do—dragged me into fiction writing—something else I never expected to do. Tim and I took five years to write, film and produce a full-length sci-fi comedy, The Emissary, which included building onto our house a five-channel surround sound studio. We are currently self-distributing.

Thanks to overwhelming support from our community, The Emissary was selected to open the 2015 Green Bay Film Festival, was an official selection of both the Coalition for Quality Children’s Media Kid’s First! film festival and the Door County Film Festival.

Now we are creating an end-to-end encrypted digital platform protecting users’ works from AI scraping, with no unwanted advertising. We are strongly opposed to generative AI scraping creators’ works and are trying to stop that. Making a movie was easier.

Following our movie's premiere, I thought, someone should turn this into a book! So, using characters inspired by our movie, I wrote three unpublished novels during the pandemic.

I'm currently querying book 1, Farmer Wafflequisp's Secret Machine (119K words) to agents. It's followed by The Clue in the Cheese Curds (100K words), and the conclusion, Mindful Approaches to Everything Possibly Exploding (90K words).

My stories have strayed from our movie. I added themes I care about: the threats of a polluting factory farm, the struggles of a female climate scientist, and the conflicts of a gay farmhand who is verbally bullied by his employer. My goal was to create complex plots that resolve in satisfying ways, because I love reading that sort of story.

Having worked as a planetarium lecturer, I still promote amateur astronomy. I accidentally discovered an asteroid. I named it after my husband. This sounds impressive but I was trying to track a different, known asteroid, so this was kind of a screw-up on my part. Asteroid Tim Erskine isn’t very interesting or threatening.

I feel lucky to live in Door County, Wisconsin. My husband and I share the view overlooking Green Bay with our beloved cats.