To Stay Calm in the Face of the Absurd, You Really Do Need Some Science and Humanities | Some Good Books

Over the National Day holiday we asked eight young writers to recommend the books they rate. Each has built something real in their own field and enjoys passing on what they learn. Here is the second of them: Chen Chao.

It's book-recommendation season again.

This time last year, QDaily asked a group of interesting people behind big accounts on Weibo, WeChat and Zhihu to recommend books to us. Among them were Zhihu founder Zhou Yuan, Guokr founder Ji Shisan, Zhang Wei, who runs the WeChat official account "Shixiang", Wu Miao, who runs the WeChat official account "Leviathan", and screenwriter Shi Hang. The invitation read: recommend a book from the past year that you think is good. It might help you in your work, or it might simply be good. Chinese or English, no limits.

This year we have changed the format a little.

In any era, expert readers are scarce. Their judgment about which books to recommend and how to review them can guide the rest of us — and a book of reviews can itself be worth reading, as Tony Judt's Reappraisals is.

Not all the writers we invited brood over twentieth-century history the way Judt does, of course. They are younger, more entertaining, sharp-eyed, and not professional writers; each carries some weight in their own field, and each likes to share what they know and think.

We want to introduce them to you through a "book list plus long review" format, and give you something to go on in the small business of reading.

Because everyone's experience differs, the picks and the reviews vary widely in style, and chewing over those differences is itself rather fun. From October 1 to October 8 we will publish one writer's list and review each day. We hope they are useful. If you know other expert readers worth hearing from, tell us in the comments — you may see their work here before long.

Here is the second of them: Chen Chao.

Chen Chao is a product manager, a science writer and a member of Songshuhui, the science-writing collective. He trained in cognitive neuroscience and now follows handset development and the mobile internet in countries such as India. So you are about to see a great many books about science and the internet. You will also see this young writer's feeling for the humanities — which makes it easier to understand how technology acts on human society.

Book Recommendations

Text/Chen Chao

Growth Hacking (《增长黑客》)

Author: Fan Bing

Publisher: Publishing House of Electronics Industry

Published: July 2015

The neat tricks of our trade

The internet industry manufactures "business models," and it manufactures job titles too. "Growth hacker" is one of the newest off the line. Gripped by the practitioner's fear of falling behind, I hurried through the case studies in this book. In computer engineering, "hack" sometimes means a quick and dirty fix — in Chinese, roughly "crude, fast and fierce" — and it is usually a choice made under pressure. Pressure like that leaves little room for elegance or grace. Contrary to the "flighty" label so often pinned on this industry, over the long run every clever play in these cases ends up played out. A fast company is really fast fashion: out of style before you have worn it. How could anyone not be anxious?

Life Ascending

Author: [UK] Nick Lane

Translator: Zhang Boran

Publisher: Science Press

Published: November 2015

The real thing

There is more than one kind of good science book, and they offer more than one kind of value: new knowledge, relaxation, a knowing smile. Life Ascending belongs to a rare kind — the kind that thrills. Nick Lane starts from biochemistry and ranges from the environment of the early Earth to genes, from the origin of life, DNA and photosynthesis to vision, consciousness and death. You can read it as a continuation of the blind watchmaker problem: how did life this complex emerge from the simplest physical and chemical changes? A science book that lays out a chain of logic to answer questions like these — we might as well call it honkaku, the orthodox school.

City Gate, Open Up (《城门开》)

Author: Bei Dao

Publisher: SDX Joint Publishing Company

Published: July 2015

Beijing is a palimpsest, scraped clean again and again

In Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life, the Harvard professor Jie Li uses a very obscure word, palimpsest — originally a sheet of parchment scraped free of its writing so it can be written on again — to describe how Shanghai has changed, and the word carries real weight. Reading Bei Dao's City Gate, Open Up, I cannot resist showing off the same word. For a Beijinger like me, born in the mid-1980s, the Beijing of my childhood has been erased and written over. Only after reading did I realize that beneath the two or three Beijings I have lived through, the older marks of repeated scrapings since 1949 are still faintly visible. Labels like "compound family" and "Beijing No. 4 High School" still turn up in my life, but they no longer mean what they meant. For my generation, Bei Dao's book is a kind of archaeology of memory.

A Cultural Tour of New England (《新英格兰人文之旅》)

Author: Du Xianju

Publisher: Guangxi Normal University Press

Published: November 2015

Worth tracing on a map

Thoreau's essays were one of my first literary awakenings — or rather, Xu Chi's translations of them were. Walden Pond and Cape Cod were "imagined place names" to me in middle school. In this book Du, whom readers know as Juzi, sets out carefully the lives and the geography of New England's literary figures, and it reads lightly and enjoyably, making you want to open Google Maps and follow along. At last those place names turn concrete and weave into a network with everything else you know.

How to Read Literature

Author: [UK] Terry Eagleton

Translator: Fan Hao

Publisher: Henan University Press

Published: May 2015

Acquired taste

How to Read Literature is like a fistful of chili. Eagleton moves easily through A Passage to India and The Turn of the Screw, and has enormous fun with what we call serious literature and literary criticism. Acquired taste: on the surface, a liking you pick up through experience; underneath, a way of saying that you know it tastes bad and are putting on a show. Yet in this book, even the classics that ordinary readers have largely stopped reading are given fresh pleasure by an acquired critical skill. Eagleton also takes Harry Potter apart with obvious mischief, then says the book is not worth criticizing — he was only showing us how criticism should be done.

Book Reviews

Polio: An American Story (《他们应当行走》)

Author: [US] David M. Oshinsky

Translator: Yang Xi

Publisher: Tsinghua University Press

Published: September 2015

Walking in their light: how the polio vaccine came around again

Text/Chen Chao

Two details in the Shandong vaccine scandal that shook the country caught my eye. First, the vaccines exposed were so-called Category II vaccines, none of them on the national mandatory immunization schedule. Second, the list of tainted products plainly included the inactivated polio vaccine. That was confusing: isn't the polio sugar cube something every child has to take? Why is this vaccine a Category II product that nobody is required to take?

The answer is simple enough. The sugar cube we all ate as children is an attenuated vaccine containing live virus that can barely cause disease. Swallow it and your body builds resistance to poliovirus. The inactivated vaccine seized in this case is made by killing the virus, so it holds no live virus at all; it protects about as well as the attenuated kind, but carries less risk — the few-in-a-hundred-thousand chance of causing disease that comes with the attenuated version vanishes in a well-made inactivated vaccine. Because it costs a little more, however, many countries still roll out the attenuated version. The inactivated vaccine is available in China too, but for now people pay for it themselves.

Do not dismiss the gap between the two. Behind it lies a famous episode in the history of science: a lifelong argument between two vaccine scientists, and one of humanity's great victories over a disease. The story is told in Polio: An American Story, published in Chinese as 《他们应当行走》, "They Shall Walk." It came out in 2005 and won that year's Pulitzer Prize. Its author, David M. Oshinsky, is a historian in the Division of Medical Humanities at New York University who specializes in the less-examined sides of American history. Here he traces the twentieth-century invention of the polio vaccine, and the men and women who played their parts in it.

Humanity has long been harried by severe infectious diseases: smallpox, plague, typhoid, cholera, influenza. Contrary to what we might assume, polio was never an especially "important" one. The reason is a little cruel. Against the shrieking of other deadly epidemics, polio was only a thin, unbroken background hum, usually drowned out. It often infected children and sometimes struck adults, but many patients were left with no lasting damage; and once you had had a mild case, you were unlikely to catch it again. While the deadlier diseases raged, an outbreak every few years looked unremarkable. Then sanitation improved, the shrieking died down, and the background hum grew loud. Most infectious diseases hit people living in poor conditions; polio preferred children who had escaped infection in infancy. From the end of the nineteenth century it became an American nightmare. Every few years brought a polio summer: public facilities shut, schools closed, and in some small towns the outbreak all but collapsed the local hospital. A few children were left paralyzed for life; a handful died when the infection reached the medulla and they could no longer breathe; and the virus went quiet again, waiting for the next summer.

Some diseases produce their own star patients, and polio had the most famous of all: Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the high summer of 1921, after a run of public events, Roosevelt felt exhausted, then came down with a high fever, and soon lost all feeling in his legs. At first his family tried to hide the illness — for a rising political star, disability was hardly an asset. But before long Roosevelt recast himself, returned to public life, and became a celebrated fighter against the disease. His political career needs no retelling; fewer people know that he was also a co-founder of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. The illness introduced him to a young lawyer, Basil O'Connor, and the two opened a firm together. Unlike Roosevelt, who came from political and business money, O'Connor was the son of an Irish workingman, full of energy and waiting for his chance. Roosevelt had picked the ideal partner: for the next several decades O'Connor ran the foundation. It practically invented modern philanthropy, pulling in donations from the rich and a steady stream of small gifts from everyone else. Its fundraising and publicity worked so well that it was accused of taking more than its share of public attention. Whatever the verdict there, O'Connor's money and publicity machine bankrolled one man's career: Jonas Salk, who made the first polio vaccine.

Salk was known for hard work; during the First World War the army had hired him to develop an influenza vaccine. By the time he joined the polio effort, several laboratories were already at it and had taken plenty of wrong turns. Salk used the method he knew: kill virus samples with formalin and make an inactivated vaccine. Even in the 1940s this was not advanced. The microbiology and vaccine-making of the day aimed instead to culture low-virulence strains that would raise resistance in the body without causing illness. Many scientists looked down on Salk's approach, the famous microbiologist Albert Sabin among them. But with enormous charitable funding and a fairly simple production method, the Salk vaccine went into its first nationwide trial in 1954. The trial was double-blind across the country — the children did not know whether they were getting the vaccine or a placebo — so that its safety and effectiveness could be proved. The foundation hired statisticians to run it, put IBM's most advanced machines to work, and used the FORTRAN programming language to process the results for the first time. In the end the statistician in charge announced at a grand press conference that the vaccine was 60 to 80 percent effective. The event carried all the foundation's flair for publicity, and from that day on, however loudly academics complained, Salk was fixed in place as a benefactor of humankind.

Looking back, that press conference was probably the summit of Salk's life. For the man who made the polio vaccine, never again matching the feat would be no disgrace. But what followed was peculiarly ironic. After the press conference Salk became an angel sent down to earth, an American hero. Yet badly made batches remained dangerous, and the question of how well the vaccine worked was unsettled. The scientific establishment still would not accept his method — small-minded at the time, though in hindsight not without foresight. The loudest of the mockers was the virologist Albert Sabin.

Sabin was another Jewish doctor who, like Salk, had made a place for himself in American medicine through talent and hard work. The difference was that Sabin's scientific grounding was stronger, and his way of building a vaccine fit what the field expected. In the race to make one, laboratories did whatever they could, and more than a few experimented on children and prisoners, carrying the ethical stain so common in the medical research of that era. Sabin was different: this hot-tempered scientist was the most exacting of them all about science and about ethics, and the most accomplished. In 1956 his live-virus vaccine was ready.

Several historical events combined to make Sabin's vaccine a triumph. First came a tragedy. The public wanted the government to push the Salk vaccine out, but the Eisenhower administration believed in small government and wanted companies and non-governmental organizations to carry this public-health burden. So the government was attacked for doing nothing. Then came a mass vaccine-contamination episode: many vaccinated children fell ill and health officials lost their jobs. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ocean, a fresh wind was blowing through the postwar Soviet Union. Newly installed health officials and biologists wanted to clear away the gloom of the Lysenko years and push science forward, and Sabin was invited over to deploy his vaccine. This time the whole Soviet state stood behind the campaign, and the new vaccine was given out on a huge scale without a double-blind trial. We know this one better: the polio sugar cube. It proved safer and more effective. American opinion boiled over too: now we are losing not only the space race but public health to the Soviets. Before long Sabin's vaccine displaced Salk's, and it became the polio vaccine used in nearly every country.

What Sabin never took from Salk was public fame. Perhaps because the fight had been so bitter, none of the scientists who worked on the vaccine won a Nobel Prize. Almost all the leading figures except Salk were elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Salk went on making inactivated vaccines by his old method and never succeeded again. In the 1980s he announced he would take on AIDS, and Sabin mocked him without mercy. Even so, he was still the benefactor of humankind. San Diego, California, gave him a piece of land, and he founded the Salk Institute on it. Its buildings are a masterpiece by the architect Louis Kahn. If anyone truly had to design a temple of science, I suspect it would look like the Salk Institute. The story has to stop somewhere: Sabin was the less famous winner.

Then the story turned once more. After both men were dead, the fear of polio faded almost to nothing; today the name goes with war, ignorance and poverty. In recent years wild poliovirus has persisted only in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria, and vaccination campaigns there are still interfered with and blocked. In China the sugar cube has been an extraordinary success, with no large outbreak since the 1990s. Before long the World Health Organization may declare the virus beaten for good. At which point the attenuated vaccine we have relied on all along becomes one of the very few remaining causes of the disease. Next, China will run its 2013–2018 strategic plan for the final stage of polio eradication, and the oral attenuated vaccine may gradually withdraw from the campaign. The inactivated vaccine, mocked by the previous generation of virologists, will start to take its place, precisely because of what it is.

One of the twentieth century's many achievements is the polio vaccine — made twice over. The argument between Salk and Sabin ended when they died; history turns and moves on, and we live under the protection of two great men and several generations of public-health workers. The Chinese title of the book, 《他们应当行走》, comes from the Book of Isaiah, and alongside the history of the vaccine it records what patients, medical staff, charities and governments did in this fight. The fight may now be close to over. We can walk without fear because we walk in the light of everyone else.

(This article first appeared in issue 382 of the Oriental Morning Post's Shanghai Review of Books, published May 29, 2016.)

Cover image from: healthimpactnews