Elizabeth > Recent Status Updates

Excellent. Hard to put down. Gives a glimpse of India during the Emergency under Indira Ghandi, with flashbacks to earlier parts of history (the caste system, violence against Muslims in India). Loved Dina's touching relationship with her husband (the umbrella!). I have already cried several times.

Part five: Genetics, Boveri chromosomal aberrations, Morgan/Muller mutations, Temin cancer in dish + retrovirus RNA to DNA in cell, Varmus/Bishop gene src from normal cells, Rowley chromosome staining, Knudson modeling retinoblastoma, proto-oncogenes vs. tumor suppressors, Weinberg locates gene ras by transfer to normal cells, + Dryja locates retinoblastoma, Leder's OncoMouse, Weinberg/Hanahan hallmarks of cancer.

Parts three and four: Feminism pushes for trials that disprove radical mastectomy, hormone treatment, measures of (lack of) progress, chimney sweeps and carcinogens, battle against the tobacco industry, bacterial carcinogens, prevention (pap smears/mammograms), bone marrow transfusions and megadose chemotherapy (later disproven), AIDS, experiment as treatment, law suits against insurance companies, Bezwoda's scam.

Part two: Mary Lasker (allied with Farber) and cancer philanthrophy/policy, Frei and Freireich and multidrug chemotherapy, Hodgkin's lymphoma, Peyton Rous and cancer-causing viruses, Nixon and the war on cancer (c.f. Manhattan Project, putting a man on the moon). Learning a lot but bothered by the (lack of) structure and fluctuating timeframes.

Part one: Cancer in antiquity (shorter lifespans so more rare), Galen’s black bile theory, Vesalius’s study of anatomy, anesthesia and antisepsis + Halsted's radical surgery at the turn of the century, radiation, specificity, Ehrlich and chemistry for biology (German dye companies and mustard gas), Trudy Elion, Farber and antifolate, media campaigns. Ties to colonialism (anemia in Bombay, dyes for textile industry).

This book is blowing me away. Science in fiction, as opposed to science fiction. Power abuse in a scientific setting. Colonialism. The anthropology of lab culture and how scientific communities are different today than in the 30s and 40s (the scattered genius vs. the put-together gentlemen of the Feynman/Oppenheimer era).

Made it to transsexualism and autogynephilia. This part seems even murkier. Some unprofessional sexualizing of his subjects, plus I have some major questions about these methods (at least, as they're conveyed here). How can you be sure your results are unbiased when you assume your subjects are lying? Was this compared to self-eroticism in cis women? How many trans women were actually studied?

Some parts reasonable, others problematically loose. Some examples:
* Mentions a study that concludes people can't distinguish gay and straight men by appearance, then says he intuitively knows there are differences anyway.
* Entertains ludicrous claims: "If gay men are correct in their suspicion that male bisexuality exists, this second twin is probably gay." I can give an easy counterexample to this.

Reading this popular book about autogynephilia precisely because I heard it was very controversial, in preparation for Galileo's Middle Finger by Alice Dreger. Patient stories are interesting. Not to autogynephilia yet, but the section on gender dysphoria "treatment" with coming out as trans assumed as a "bad outcome" is quite troubling.