Quality Control

Having read a review of "A Molecule Away from Madness" in the New York Times Book Review, I quickly downloaded it to Kindle.  

The only reservation the reviewer, Annie Murphy Paul, voiced was the author had not revealed much about herself in the course of her narrative about the fascinating neurological diseases she describes.  Well, I thought, that's a virtue in many cases. Of course, the reviewer compared this new author to Oliver Sacks, the grace and clarity of prose. 

Expecting a journey through both familiar and new territory, led by an author in the footsteps of  Sacks, Berton Rouche, Natalie Angier, Gina Kolata, Lawrence Altman, I flipped open my paper white and flew off a cliff, like some misguided lemming. 

The writing would have not made it past my high school English teachers. And it was not just the occasional malapropism, but the indiscipline suffused every sentence, the rank amateurism simply destroyed the stories.  

You have to fight your way past the writing to the story.

"He used chemicals to turn the samples into liquid. Finally, he injected the material into several chimpanzees that lived in his laboratory."

My God! Where to begin?

These chimpanzees, living in this scientist's laboratory, as opposed to living in the jungle, were the subjects of this experiment? Why do we need to be told the chimps were residents of the lab? If the scientist was using them for the experiment do we not already know the chimps' domicile? Or, perhaps, these resident chimps were there, as opposed to chimps who just happened to wander through the lab and were trapped into being subjects? 

And the chemicals in which the brain samples were liquified--do we need to know that the tissue had to be dissolved into a liquid to be injected?

My high school teacher's blue pencil would have slashed through all this and what would be left would be, "Chimps, injected with brain material from diseased brains, exhibited the same syndromes seen in human subjects."

Even the "Months later, the animals developed the same symptoms akin to the clinical syndromes in humans," which followed, is jarring to any medically trained human. 

Symptoms are what a patient reports to the doctor which the doctor cannot see for himself--nausea, lightheadedness, pain. Signs are what the doctor can observe in the patient: vomiting, unsteadiness of gait, grimacing. The chimps showed signs of the syndromes; they did not complain of symptoms. (Unless these brain injections really did do something remarkable to those chimps, which would be another and more exciting story altogether.)

"Using a foul-smelling adhesive, she attached two dozen electrodes to Joe's scalp. His hair stood in all directions, as if in fright, to make room for the small pieces."

Which is to say, the patient had an electroencephalogram. 

I suppose this description is supposed to place you in the viewpoint of the patient's wife or the patient himself, but it is entirely irrelevant and adds nothing to the pathos and horror of the story told. In fact, it reads like a snippet from Daniel Tiger, that nauseating profoundly insipid children's cartoon show, where every moment is filled with empathy, fear, compassion and the mother's milk of reassuring drivel.

Enough said

But I'm not writing this to complain about my misspent $9 for the Kindle edition. In fact, I keep reading because the author does assemble and connect a series of fascinating diseases and patient cases, which need no emotional embellishment, because the stark facts of suffering are so evident, but I'm writing because I was moved to look up the author, to see what sort of academic training, if any, she had suffered through, to arrive on the other side so wholly incapable of constructing a single well wrought sentence.

She is, it turns out, a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, which claims to be one of the most elite medical schools in the country--although some have doubted this, dubbing Penn Med as "Penn Pretender" with insistent claims to a glory not actually demonstrated by achievement.  

Penn medical school has, for years, tried to compensate for a dearth of actual faculty talent by claiming to accept only the most illustrious undergraduates and it will not even consider a medical student applying to its post graduate training if that student is not AOA, which is the Phi Beta Kappa of the medical school world. Make it exclusive and you make it superior, seems to be the strategy.

In recent years, Penn has been more famous for eating its young, as it cashiered the lady who pioneered mRNA science which formed the basis for the mRNA vaccines almost into oblivion.  Only when talk welled up about a possible Nobel prize for this lady, whose work likely saved more lives than any other technology since the discovery of insulin 100 years ago, has a technology and investigative breakthrough had as much impact. Now Penn is running advertisements in the New Yorker claiming that such investigators are nurtured at Penn and it's no surprise the work was done there.

Such a story really illustrates Christopher Hitchens' remark that hypocrisy is the compliment canard pays to truth. 

Penn, at least has the excuse it is a medical school, and if medical students cannot write, that is the fault of the undergraduate colleges where they are supposed to teach that sort of thing. In fact, the famous explanation by the Dean of Harvard Medical School about why there were no written exams at the medical school in the early 20th century: "Very few of the students would be capable of writing competently enough to write an exam."

But getting back to the author of A Molecule Away, here is a young woman who doesn't even know how bad she is. (At least as a writer; she may be a stellar neurologist.) No editor has explained it to her. No book reviewer--and this review appeared in the hallowed pages of THE NEW YORK TIMES--has let her know. 

So there we have it. The center will not hold. Bad is good. Every author needs a safe space. Criticism and correction and basic skills are just so 20th century, at least among the elite. The effete elite.

Somewhere out there among the unwashed, dismissed, disrespected state colleges and universities, and community colleges, there may be some folks who will replace H.L. Mencken and Christopher Hitchens and Oliver Sacks, but as of this current report, none have been detected on the bleak horizon of Kindle or The New York Times.