Town Hall Seattle Science Series

Whether we can see it or not, the impacts of Monsanto— the agrochemical giant best known for creating the herbicide Roundup and the genetically engineered seeds that resist it— are everywhere. Monsanto has shaped and reshaped the farms that provide food to people worldwide; and while we might not be able to see the breadth of the company’s impacts, we’re most certainly eating them. In Seed Money, Bartow J. Elmore investigated how the future of food remains tethered to Monsanto, despite a toxic and troubling past that extends far beyond Roundup. Through extensive fieldwork, previously-unseen records, and countless interviews with farmers, lawyers, chemists, and past employees, he traced Monsanto’s rise and eventual domination of an agricultural empire. While it’s easy to imagine a cadre of evil corporate villains at the helm, plotting the demise of the world, Elmore found something more subtle. His research revealed a cautionary tale of what happens when a series of seemingly small decisions have a cascading effect on an entire global system. Bartow J. Elmore teaches environmental and business history at The Ohio State University. For this project he received the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award and a New America fellowship. He lives with his family in Columbus, Ohio. Buy the Book: Seed Money: Monsanto's Past and Our Food Future (Hardcover) from Third Place Books  Presented by Town Hall Seattle as part of the Town Green series. 

When it comes to human reproduction, particularly from a Western perspective, there’s no shortage of physical things involved. Pregnancy tests. Maternity clothing. Pacifiers. Baby carriers. Reproduction and parenting involve a plethora of objects, each designed with a purpose in mind and each contributing to the reproductive experience, for better or for worse. Historians and authors Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick explored the stuff of reproduction in their new book, Designing Motherhood: Things that Make and Break Our Births. Their highly visual, design-driven book explores over 80 objects that have shaped the world of people and babies during the past century, revealing designs that range from iconic to just plain strange. Together, Fisher and Winick considered how design impacted everything from the clothing that pregnant people wear to how the home pregnancy test was once a “threat” to male gynecologists—and beyond. Michelle Millar Fisher, a curator and architecture and design historian, is Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She lectures frequently on design, people, and the politics of things. Amber Winick is a writer, design historian, and recipient of two Fulbright Awards. She has lived, researched, and written about family and child-related designs, policies, and practices around the world. Zoë Greggs is a queer, Black, disabled Philadelphia-based artist and nonprofit administrator who serves as the Community Outreach Coordinator at Maternity Care Coalition (MCC). Greggs is also the Curatorial Assistant for Designing Motherhood, where she brings her expertise of community engagement, project management, and art history.  Buy the Book: Designing Motherhood: Things that Make and Break Our Births (Hardcover) from Third Place Books  Presented by Town Hall Seattle. To become a member or make a donation click here. 

We’ve pondered the puzzles of the human body for millennia, questioning the function of both the visible parts and the parts hidden away behind layers of skin, muscle, and bones. When it comes to the human body— and the bodies of many other living creatures— the heart is an organ that’s long been central to our understanding of life. How did humans get from mummifying the heart separately from the body in order to weigh the soul inside it, as ancient Egyptians once did, to the modern ability to save and extend lives by transplanting a heart from one human into another? In Pump: A Natural History of the Heart, zoologist Bill Schutt explored the mind-boggling history of the heart in both human and non-human life forms. He covered everything from clear-blooded Antarctic icefish to the origin of the stethoscope, weaving in fascinating myths, hypotheses gone wrong, and scientific breakthroughs along the way. You’ll never consider that rhythmic thumping in your chest the same way again. Bill Schutt is a vertebrate zoologist and author of six nonfiction and fiction books, including the New York Times Editor’s Choice, Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History. Recently retired from his post as professor of biology at LIU Post, he is a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, where he has studied bats all over the world. His research has been featured in Natural History magazine as well as in the New York Times, Newsday, the Economist, and Discover. Buy the Book: Pump: A Natural History of the Heart (Hardcover) from Third Place Books Presented by Town Hall Seattle. To become a member or make a donation click here. 

All human beings are 99.9 percent identical in their genetic makeup. All our differences are found in the remaining .1 percent. Our DNA makes us different in our personalities and in our health, and both matter when it comes to educational and economic success in our current society. In The Genetic Lottery, clinical psychology professor Paige Harden aimed to reclaim genetic science from the legacy of eugenics and dismantle dangerous ideas about racial superiority. She argued that we must acknowledge the role of genetic luck if we are ever to create a fair society. Genetically associated inequalities, Harden brought forth, can be viewed through a lens of “luck egalitarianism.” This philosophical perspective on fair versus unfair inequality is already manifest in current research and policy. She proposed that genetic research can be used to advance equity goals. Regardless of the .1 percent, we can all be equal. Paige Harden, Ph.D. is a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is the director of the Developmental Behavior Genetics lab and co-directs the Texas Twin Project. Buy the Book: The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality (Hardcover) from Third Place Books Presented by Town Hall Seattle. To become a member or make a donation click here. 

Plastic is everywhere, and it lasts forever. But humans have a hard time grasping “forever”— the scope is far greater than our comprehension. That’s precisely the problem that Allison Cobb explored in her new book, Plastic: An Autobiography. Cobb aimed to give shape to behemoths like climate change, nuclear technologies, and racism, using plastic waste as the thread that connects them all. She insisted that the current design of manufacturing and retail, which relies on a cycle of consuming and discarding, obstructs our view of the humans who actually create objects. It’s a design that’s intentional; because if consumers truly knew how things were made and who was making them, could we continue living the way that we do on this planet? Allison Cobb is the author of four books: Plastic: an Autobiography, Green-Wood, After We All Died, and Born2. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, and many other journals. She was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and National Poetry Series; has been a resident artist at Djerassi and Playa; and received fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission, the Regional Arts and Culture Council, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Allison works for the Environmental Defense Fund and lives in Portland, Oregon. Clayton Aldern is a writer and data scientist interested in science and society. His writing has been published by The Atlantic, The Economist, Scientific American, Logic, and Grist, among others. Based in the Pacific Northwest, he is currently working on a book about the effects of climate change and environmental degradation on neurochemistry, behavior, decision-making, and mental and emotional health. Buy the Book: Plastic: An Autobiography (Paperback) from Elliott Bay Books Presented by Town Hall Seattle and Grist.

The Sahara desert, once upon a time, wasn’t a desert at all. It was green. It was a pleasant place, fed by rivers and lakes. It was home to crocodiles, hippos, turtles, and fish of all stripes. Prehistoric hunters and gatherers came to the lush land, as well, to partake of its rich bounty. It’s now the largest hot desert in the world, equal in size to the United States. Temperatures can reach upward of 130 degrees and sand dunes can climb to nearly 600 feet in height. All this begs the question: What happened? Martin Williams, in When the Sahara Was Green: How Our Greatest Desert Came to Be, helped answer this question, and asks many more. A time-traveler, of a sort, Williams went back millions of years to showcase the rich history of earth’s greatest desert. Why did its climate change? Did it really have forests roamed through by dinosaurs? How has all this impacted human populations? Will the desert ever return to that verdant Eden? And what will climate change do to the desert? He also brought to the fore the science and scientists who have come to the desert to ask more questions and find more answers in the arid heat and the deep sand. Answers, and the knowledge that even in the harshest of environments, life finds a way. Martin Williams is professor emeritus and adjunct professor of earth sciences at the University of Adelaide. His many books include Climate Change in Deserts; Nile Waters, Saharan Sands; and The Nile Basin. Buy the Book: When the Sahara Was Green: How Our Greatest Desert Came to Be (Hardcover) from Elliott Bay Books Presented by Town Hall Seattle. To become a member or make a donation click here. 

The web of life is sometimes freezing. Take, for instance, what’s happening in the Alaska Arctic. In one of the largest remaining wilderness ecosystems on the planet, the frigid place is home to the Western Arctic Caribou Herd, and is also a hotspot to study the effects of climate change. What becomes of the caribou if climate change continues unabated? Further, what becomes of those that live, and depend, on the caribou, like the indigenous Iñupiat people, if the caribou disappear? The interconnectedness of us all is hanging by a thread. Seth Kantner was born and raised in northern Alaska and has worked as a trapper, wilderness guide, wildlife photographer, gardening teacher, and adjunct professor. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Outside, Orion, and Smithsonian. Kantner is the author of the award-winning novel Ordinary Wolves, memoir Shopping for Porcupine, and collection of essays Swallowed by the Great Land: And Other Dispatches from Alaska’s Frontier. He has been a commercial fisherman in Kotzebue Sound for more than four decades and lives in the Northwest Arctic. Bellamy Pailthorp covers the environment beat from the Seattle offices of KNKX Public Radio News, where she has worked since 1999. She also has a deep interest in indigenous affairs and the Salish Sea. Buy the Book: A Thousand Trails Home: Living with Caribou [Hardcover] from Mountaineers Books Presented by Town Hall Seattle. To become a member or make a donation click here. 

What’s a little lizard to do when another ferocious hurricane comes tearing through its homelands? Grow larger toe pads to grip more tightly. Where are the long-spined urchins going? South, to find cooler homes. How come the aggressive butterflyfish isn’t fighting anymore? The coral they loved is no longer worth fighting for. Thor Hanson, who last appeared at Town Hall to talk about bees, is back with a story, ultimately, of hope. Climate change is a disaster and is wreaking havoc the world over. However, the natural world is doing what it can to cope with the new problems and trying to come up with solutions of its own. Plants and animals are responding to climate change in a variety of ways: adjusting, evolving, or dying out. Hanson has visited grizzly bears in Alaska, Walden Pond (that’s grown 4 degrees warmer since Thoreau’s time), and brown pelicans looming over the sea. Fraught with peril, it is. But there’s also hope: if a little lizard can adapt, humans can too. Thor Hanson is an author and biologist. A Guggenheim Fellow, a Switzer Environmental Fellow, and winner of the John Burroughs Medal, Hanson has written such books as Buzz, The Triumph of Seeds, Feathers, and others. Buy the Book: Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid: The Fraught and Fascinating Biology of Climate Change from Phinney Books Presented by Town Hall Seattle. To become a member or make a donation click here. 

Methuselah lived to 969 years old, according to the Bible. In our recent age, Jeanne Calmet holds the title of the oldest person who ever lived. She lived to be 122 years and 164 days old. There’s a woman in Japan, Kane Tanaka, who is currently 118. Jiroemon Kimuri, also from Japan, is the oldest man of all time, living to 116 years and 54 days. How did they do it? How do some people avoid the deterioration and weakness that plagues many of their peers decades early? Is it luck, or something else? Is it possible to grow older without getting sicker? Could a 90-year-old not look a day over 50? In Age Later, Dr. Nir Barzilai, a pioneer in aging research, looked both at the four age-related diseases that take most of us (diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s) and at SuperAgers (people who have maintained active lives well into their 90s who’ve never experienced any of those diseases). What can we learn from these subjects, who have not only reached a ripe old age but have further ripened the older they get? Dr. Barzilai revealed the secrets of these SuperAgers and the scientific discoveries so that we can mimic some of their natural resistance to the aging process. This isn’t to say we’ll live to 969, but there’s still plenty of life yet to live for all of us. Dr. Nir Barzilai is the founding Director of the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and is Director of the Nathan Shock Center for Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging and the Einstein Glenn Center for the Biology of Human Aging. He is also the Scientific Director of the American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR). Lee Hood, MD, PhD is a world-renowned scientist who co-founded Seattle’s Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) in 2000 and served as its first President from 2000-2017. When ISB affiliated with Providence in 2016, Dr. Hood became Providence’s Senior Vice President and Chief Science Officer. He is also Chief Strategy Officer and Professor at ISB. Buy the Book: Age Later: Health Span, Life Span, and the New Science of Longevity (Hardcover) Third Place Books  Presented by Town Hall Seattle and Institute for Systems Biology. 

Want to have a tooth pulled? There’s a risk in doing so. Need to have an X-ray because you broke your femur? There’s a risk in doing that, too. Chemotherapy? Having your appendix removed? Getting the COVID-19 vaccine? There’s risk in all of it. From risk, however, can come innovation and solutions. In You Bet Your Life, Dr. Paul Offit gave a long-ranging peek into how medical treatments come to be. It’s made, in part, through risk. From the first blood transfusions 400 years ago to the hunt for the COVID-19 vaccine, risk has been essential. It’s fraught with danger though with many relationships at play. Between intellectual breakthroughs, political realities, and human foibles, the path is a rocky one, but, from it, we can reach new plateaus of medical understanding and healthier lives. Dr. Paul Offit is the chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Author of nine books, he is also professor of vaccinology and pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Dr. Larry Corey is an internationally renowned expert in virology, immunology and vaccine development, and the former president and director of Fred Hutch. Buy the Book: You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation (Hardcover) Third Place Books Presented by Town Hall Seattle. To become a member or make a donation click here.