April Events
Coming this Month
Harvard Science Book Talks welcomes the latest 4 speakers in our series—Jack Szostak, Paulina Rowińska, Neal Baer, and Adam Becker.
Join us for an array of topics ranging from AI Overlords and mathematical mapping to the bioethics of gene editing and the search for life beyond Earth.
Jack Szostak, in conversation with Dimitar Sasselov, Is Earth Exceptional?: The Quest for Cosmic Life
Date: Thursday, April 10, 2025, 6pm
*Note: this event will be held in Jefferson Lab 250*
For a long time, scientists have wondered how life has emerged from inanimate chemistry, and whether Earth is the only place where it exists. Charles Darwin speculated about life on Earth beginning in a warm little pond. Some of his contemporaries believed that life existed on Mars. It once seemed inevitable that the truth would be known by now.
It is not. For more than a century, the origins and extent of life have remained shrouded in mystery. But, as Mario Livio and Jack Szostak reveal in Is Earth Exceptional?, the veil is finally lifting. The authors describe how life’s building blocks—from RNA to amino acids and cells—could have emerged from the chaos of Earth’s early existence. They then apply the knowledge gathered from cutting-edge research across the sciences to the search for life in the cosmos: both life as we know it and life as we don’t.
Why and where life exists are two of the biggest unsolved problems in science. Is Earth Exceptional? is the ultimate exploration of the question of whether life is a freak accident or a chemical imperative.
Dr. Jack Szostak is a University Professor and Professor of Chemistry at the University of Chicago, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dr. Szostak’s early research on telomere structure and function and the role of telomere maintenance in preventing cellular senescence was recognized by the 2006 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award and the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In the 1990s Dr. Szostak and his colleagues developed in vitro selection as a tool for the isolation of functional RNA, DNA and protein molecules from large pools of random sequences. Dr. Szostak’s current research interests are in the laboratory synthesis of self-replicating systems and the origins of life.
Dimitar Sasselov is a Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University and the Founder and Director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, a multidisciplinary center bridging scientists in the physical and in the life sciences, intent to study the transition from chemistry to life and its place in the context of the Universe.
Paulina Rowińska, Mapmatics: A Mathematician’s Guide to Navigating the World
Date: Tuesday, April 15, 2025, 6pm
Why are coastlines and borders so difficult to measure? How does a UPS driver deliver hundreds of packages in a single day? And where do elusive serial killers hide? The answers lie in the crucial connection between maps and math.
In Mapmatics, mathematician Paulina Rowińska leads us on a riveting journey around the globe to discover how maps and math are deeply entwined, and always have been. From a sixteenth-century map, an indispensable navigation tool that exaggerates the size of northern countries, to public transport maps that both guide and confound passengers, to congressional maps that can empower or silence whole communities, she reveals how maps and math have shaped not only our sense of space but our worldview. In her hands, we learn how to read maps like a mathematician—to extract richer information and, just as importantly, to question our conclusions by asking what we don’t see.
Written with authority and compassion, wit and unforgettable storytelling, this is math exposition at its best. By unpacking the math behind the maps we depend on, Mapmatics illuminates how our world works and, ultimately, how we can better look after it.
Paulina Rowińska, winner of the Austrian Science Book of the Year Award, is a Cambridge-based science writer with a PhD in mathematics. After years of creating interactive math and data science content for the educational platform Brilliant, she began a master’s in science journalism at MIT last fall. Mapmatics is her debut book.
Neal Baer, in conversation with Rebecca Brendel, The Promise and Peril of CRISPR
Date: Thursday, April 17, 2025, 6pm
Scientists and genetic engineers are becoming increasingly adept at editing the human genome. How far can—and should—they go in editing future generations? In The Promise and Peril of CRISPR, editor Neal Baer brings together a timely collection of essays by influential bioethicists, philosophers, and geneticists to explore the moral, ethical, and policy challenges posed by CRISPR technology.
We are at a technological and ethical crossroads in grappling with the impacts of genetic editing. Gene-editing technology holds the promise of curing more than 7,000 known genetic diseases. Yet with that promise comes the peril of using CRISPR to edit the human genome, which could not only lead to manipulating human evolution, but also to creating and releasing pathogens capable of wreaking havoc on human, animal, and plant life. Although CRISPR has already cured several genetic diseases, it could also be used to design biological weapons or to edit the embryos of people who can afford to purchase genetic "enhancements" for their children.
What role can and should the public play in discussing the far-reaching implications of gene editing? What oversights should be put in place to prevent a rogue scientist from engineering another baby – as was recently done with twins in China?
Essay contributors offer informed predictions and guidelines for how the uses of CRISPR today will affect life in the future. Decisions we make now may have unpredictable consequences for future generations. For anyone concerned about the uses and potential abuses of gene editing, these essays provide a critical and comprehensive discussion of the central issues surrounding CRISPR technology.
Contributors: Florence Ashley, R. Alta Charo, Marcy Darnovsky, Kevin Doxzen, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Gigi Kwik Gronvall, Jodi Halpern, Katie Hasson, Andrew C. Heinrich, Jacqueline Humphries, J. Benjamin Hurlbut, Ellen D. Jorgensen, Peter F. R. Mills, Carol Padden, Marcus Schultz-Bergin, Robert Sparrow, Sandra Sufian, Krystal Tsosie, Ethan Weiss, Rachel M. West
Neal Baer, MD, MA, MEd is an award-winning showrunner, television writer/producer, physician, author, lecturer on global health and social medicine, and the co-director of the master’s degree program in Media, Medicine, and Health at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Baer most recently was Executive Producer and Showrunner for the third season of Designated Survivor. Previously, he was Executive Producer and Showrunner for the hit CBS television series Under The Dome, the CBS medical drama A Gifted Man, as well as the Executive Producer of the hit NBC television series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit from 2000-2011. During his tenure on SVU, among the awards the series won include the Shine Award, People’s Choice Award, the Prism Award, Edgar Award, Sentinel for Health Award, and the Media Access Award. Prior to his work on SVU, Dr. Baer was Executive Producer of the NBC series ER. A member of the show’s original staff and a writer and producer on the series for seven seasons, he was nominated for five Emmys as a producer. He also received Emmy nominations for Outstanding Writing in A Drama Series for the episodes Hell and High Water and Whose Appy Now?. For the latter, he also received a Writers' Guild of America nomination. Among the multiple awards the series garnered include the People’s Choice Award, the Peabody Award, and an Emmy for best drama series. Dr. Baer’s other television work includes Warriors, an episode of China Beach, nominated for a Writers' Guild Award for best episodic drama, and the ABC Afterschool Special Private Affairs, which he wrote and directed. The Association of Women in Film and Television selected the program, dealing with sexually transmitted diseases, as the Best Children’s Drama of the Year. He wrote The Doctor Corps, a feature film for Twentieth Century Fox; Outreach, a pilot for the WB Network, which he also produced; The Edge, a medical series pilot for CBS; and The Beast, a medical series pilot for NBC, which was redeveloped in 2017 by Twentieth Century Fox Television. Dr. Baer’s first novel, Kill Switch, co-written with Jonathan Greene, was published in January 2012, and his second novel, Kill Again, also with Jonathan Greene, was published in 2015. In January 2020, Dr. Baer attended the Sundance Film Festival, where the film he executive produced, Welcome to Chechnya, won a Special Jury Award. The film was screened at the Berlin Film Festival and won the Teddy Award for outstanding film on LGBTQ issues. The documentary premiered on HBO in June 2020 and won the Peabody Award.
Rebecca Brendel, MD, JD is the Director of the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School. She bases her clinical work in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) where she is the director of Law and Ethics at the Center for Law, Brain, and Behavior, provides medical oversight for the hospital’s inpatient guardianship team, and practices clinical and forensic psychiatry. Dr. Brendel has served in multiple roles at MGH over the past decade including as medical director of the One Fund Center for Boston Marathon bombing survivors, a psychiatrist on the Law & Psychiatry and Consultation Psychiatry Services, as clinical director of the Red Sox Foundation/ MGH Home Base Program for post 9/11 service members and their families, and as associate director of the MGH-based Harvard Forensic Psychiatry Fellowship. Dr. Brendel is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Adam Becker, in conversation with Cathy O’Neil & Max Gladstone, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity
Date: Monday, April 28, 2025, 6pm
Tech billionaires have decided that they should determine our futures for us. According to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and more, the only good future for humanity is one powered by technology: trillions of humans living in space, functionally immortal, served by superintelligent AIs.
In More Everything Forever, science journalist Adam Becker investigates these wildly implausible and often profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow—and shows why, in reality, there is no good evidence that they will, or should, come to pass. Nevertheless, these obsessions fuel fears that overwhelm reason—for example, that a rogue AI will exterminate humanity—at the expense of essential work on solving crucial problems like climate change. What’s more, these futuristic visions cloak a hunger for power under dreams of space colonies and digital immortality. The giants of Silicon Valley claim that their ideas are based on science, but the reality is darker: they come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience.
More Everything Forever exposes the powerful and sinister ideas that dominate Silicon Valley, challenging us to see how foolish, and dangerous, these visions of the future are.
Adam Becker is a science journalist with a PhD in astrophysics. He has written for the New York Times, the BBC, NPR, Scientific American, New Scientist, Quanta, and other publications. His first book, What Is Real?, was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and was long-listed for the PEN Literary Science Writing Award. He has been a science journalism fellow at the Santa Fe Institute and a science communicator in residence at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. He lives in California.
Cathy O’Neil lives in Cambridge, MA. She loves playing fiddle, playing piano, singing and doing word puzzles. She is the CEO of ORCAA and she gives talks all over the world about the dark side of algorithms and the for-profit shame industry.
Max Gladstone is a New York Times bestselling author and occasional game designer. Recent books include Dead Country, Last Exit, and, with Amal El-Mohtar, the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning This is How You Lose the Time War.
Please keep you heads down and your powder dry. The battle for science and truth is just beginning.
Don’t let Trump and his stooges know. They will have this shut down in no time. The goon squad will be there too. Aren’t we all just sick of Trump world. He needs to go!!