Natalie Angier has made it her personal mission to educate the general public on scientific issues. It’s an unfortunate truth that science is one of those things that the majority of people just don’t know a lot about…and they don’t even try to learn. The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, anthology of various basic concepts important for understanding the larger scientific world, is Angier’s latest effort to win the public over.

Angier fondly recalls childhood days when science was not geeky or tedious, but fun and merely an exercise of curiosity about the world around us, and throughout her book, she attempts, quite successfully, to recreate that mentality, that science is fun.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist covers five scientific areas in her book — biology, chemistry, physics, geology and astronomy – and has interviewed a number of specialists in each field to provide her audiences with as well-rounded and insightful explanations of each topic as she can…without reading like a textbook.

Even though she provides a great deal of information in her book, Angier is able to continually engage her readers with her wit and sarcasm and without intimidating jargon. As a result, The Canon should prove enjoyable and readable to people of a wide range of scientific background.

One negative aspect of Angier’s writing, though, is that she tends to lose herself in her own excitement. I found on a couple of occasions that I would forget what she was talking about and have to skim back over the page just to make sense of what she had written. Regardless, I enjoy and appreciate her enthusiasm and did not find myself putting her book down because of it.

Because a cover-to-cover read may be a little too much, I especially like that the chapters are written to work independently of one another. That is, one doesn’t necessarily lead into the other. If I wanted to learn about astronomy, I could flip to the astronomy chapters of the book, ignoring calibration and biology for the time being, and easily comprehend the material without reading the other 150 pages.

The Canon is not meant to leave a reader well versed in the intricacies and details of any subject, but rather to stimulate some deeper interest in these topics or at least provide a basis.

I would recommend this book to anyone…scientist or no scientist. Angier is fun and upbeat in her writing and has an obvious passion for the subject matter. I learned a little bit from each chapter and think that any reader has something to gain from The Canon.

– Maegen Ionoff

I had been in the Geology Building maybe twice before, and wasn't at all prepared for the serendipitous experience that was to follow.

I spent 10 minutes cruising up and down the halls before I just picked a door to knock on and introduce myself. The professor’s name was Lisa Pratt, and she is a biogeologist. I explained my goal to spend 10 hours with a researcher and asked if she or any of her students were performing any experiments any time soon.

“You said you’re a biochemistry major?” she asked.

I replied that I was, but thought it would be good to spend time in a field where I had no previous experience or knowledge base.

“I may have something for you that would work out very well.”

She told me about her grad student Adam Johnson. Adam was a biochemistry graduate student in her geology lab who was part of a NASA project and going to collect samples Friday. Dr. Pratt was supposed to help him, but had a prior engagement and had to cancel.

She took me across the hall and introduced me to Adam. She explained my project, and he agreed to let me come help.

“Well isn’t this great!” she exclaimed. “I had felt bad for not being able to go but now I’m in the clear, Adam has a pair of competent hands to help him, and (turning to me) you can get your project done in one day. It’s just serendipity at work!”

The Meeting

Ten minutes before I’m supposed to leave with Adam, I realize I’m not sure where we agreed to meet. It’s 6:20 in the morning, and I am roaming aimlessly through the halls of the Geology Building. As I make my way up the stairs to his office, a man comes through the first floor double doors and follows me up the stairs. When we finally get to the third floor, I turn and ask “Are you Adam?”

“Yes,” he replies with a laugh.

I had met Adam once before, on Wednesday. That was when it was decided that I would go with him to Techshot, and take some samples and prepare them to be sent off to other labs. But the meeting was brief and I had not recognized him as we climbed the stairs in silence.

“Is it just us today?” I ask him once in his lab.

“Yep, just us,” he says.

His orange truck waited at the back dock ready to go.

The Ride

Adam uses a company called Techshot, an engineering company located in Greenville, Indiana, to perform his experiment. It was an hour and a half ride and I was expecting to fill the early ride with questions regarding Adam’s research. Instead, most of our conversation revolved around things completely unrelated. I found out that he is originally from Colorado, but doesn’t like snow. He has a dog named Duke and two brothers. Both of his brothers are mechanics and one recently got married. He did his undergraduate at Boulder in Colorado, and his studies have taken him places like the arctic tundra of Canada and Europe.

Whenever an awkward silence fell, I was prepared with a number of questions related to this NASA project I was about to take part in. To start with, I asked him how he fell into this particular area of chemical research. When he was younger, Adam was always interested in space. After failing the vision component of his physical to get into the Air Force Academy, he attended University of Colorado in Boulder. While in college, he found that he liked chemistry and decided on research as a means to fulfill his interest in space science. The self-proclaimed astro-biogeo-Martian chemist now plays a pivotal role in a cross team collaborative research project.

The Research

Adam is part of the NASA astrobiology team working on the Biosustaining Energy and Nutrient Cycles in the Deep Subsurface of Earth and Mars project. This is a collaborative effort between different universities across the world to determine the stability of various biological organisms in a Mars environment.

Adam’s job is to prepare several samples, including fungus, nematodes, halophiles, nathanogens, permafrost, bacteria, arctic ice, and naked DNA in a synthetic Mars soil he created in his lab. The samples are then put into a chamber which mimics a Mars environment in terms of pressure, light cycles, atmospheric composition, and temperature. The total time in the chamber is 40 days, with Adam going every 10 days to remove samples and ship them off to their respective universities for further analysis.

Depending on the organisms that survive the Mars chamber, the analysis should give NASA and other scientists an idea of how deep to dig for life on Mars’ surface. The samples are compared to a control, which Adam has under normal earth conditions. The day that I went with him, it was the second 10-day period, so the samples had been in the Mars chamber for 20 days.

It was also the second time that Adam had done this experiment. The first time he sent samples to different research centers, the microbe containing tubes weren’t labeled and were unidentifiable after shipping.

A Day in the Lab

I was a little disappointed with the Mars chamber. It really was nothing more than a room that said “Mars” on the door, with a metal box and some tubes connected to gas canisters. Had it not had that “Mars” sign, I may have confused as part of the heating system for the building. I thought it would be much bigger for one thing…and a little more complex.

Adam took me to the basement of the building housing his control samples. The room was a cluttered lab with microscopes, tubing, scales and other instruments and various pieces covering the tables. We sat down at a hood and Adam began briefing me on exactly what he wanted me to do.

There were several small tubes in front of me containing dirt, and in that dirt were the microbe samples under study. All I had to do was find the corresponding labels for each group and stick those on the tubes. I would then pass those tubes off to Adam, who would plug them with glass wool and a rubber stopper. We did this for about 25 tubes.

Next, we had to wait for the samples in the Mars chamber to be ready. As I mentioned, the Mars chamber had similar conditions as the surface of Mars – similar pressure, temperature and atmosphere. If we were to open the chamber too quickly, it could ruin the experiment. So, we had to wait for the chamber to reach conditions safe to open.

When it finally opened, Adam had to work quickly so that the samples were not exposed to earth conditions too long. This included holding his breath. He had to remove the necessary samples and place them on dry ice.

Once this was finished, it was back to the basement lab.

In order to preserve the experiment, it is necessary to maintain Mars conditions as much as possible. So, for the next part Adam had to perform his work in a giant “glove bag.” This is a giant clear bag that has inserts for his hands. The bag was drained of oxygen by a vacuum and filled up with CO₂. Here, he did the same thing we had done earlier to the controls; he labeled the samples and plugged them with glass wool and a rubber stopper.

After all the tubes were plugged (60 including the controls and samples), Adam taped all of the tubes to cardboard and placed them into mason jars. No, they were ready to be shipped off.

The project, Adam soon told me, represents hundreds of man hours once one included the preparation and data analysis.

“Science can be so tedious and boring at points,” he said.

I had to agree.

--Maegan Ionoff

Maegen Ionoff is a senior at Indiana University studying biochemistry and comparative literature. She has written for the Indiana Daily Student for a year and will be working at the Herald Times as a copy editor in spring 2008. Science Writing for undergraduates with Holly Stocking was her first journalism course and she has certainly learned a lot in a very short amount of time. Maegen will continue with science writing and work to develop her skills. Her goals include working for a science magazine such as Scientific American. Her other interests include running, cycling, rock climbing, hiking and anything else related to the outdoors.

Links to Maegen’s articles

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