[Disclosure: I was an instructor in May at the 2013 Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop run by George Johnson and Sandra Blakeslee.]
George Johnson, who writes for The New York Times, National Geographic, and others, is an unusually graceful writer, with a gift for dragging us right into a scene, no matter how we might protest. To see what I mean, take a look at the July/August issue of Discover, which includes an excerpt from Johnson's forthcoming book The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine's Deepest Mystery.
Johnson has tracked down a controversial fossil jawbone that Louis Leakey once described as the oldest human fragment found in Africa and "the most ancient fragment of true Homo yet discovered anywhere in the world." Johnson is interested, though, for another reason: The fossil includes an abnormal growth that appears to be a cancer of the bone. Here's what Johnson writes upon his first glimpse of what's called the Kanam mandible at the Natural History Museum in London:
I had thought I would be content just glimpsing the Kanam jaw. I never expected to be left alone with it and to be able to hold it in my hand. It was dark brown and unexpectedly heavy and dense. That shouldn't have been surprising. It was a rock really, petrified bone. Once it had been part of a prehistoric man, or a proto-man. Two yellowed teeth were still in place, and there was a deep hole where the root of another tooth had been.
Just below that, on the left inside curve of the jaw, was the tumor…
We're right there, in the museum, with Johnson as he turns the fossil in his hands. It's almost possible to smell the dust of the museum's archives. If this is typical of what Johnson's book contains, it should be a good one.
-Paul Raeburn
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