Recent incidents of fraud by the Korean “cloner” Woo Suk Hwang and others have provoked lots of fretting about science’s integrity lately. But these episodes are trivial compared to the massive, ongoing corruption of medical research and practice by the pharmaceutical industry. One leading crusader against Big Pharma is Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and author of the 2004 polemic The Truth About Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It. Angell and other critics have badly damaged the reputation of drug companies, so much so that in the novel and film The Constant Gardener pharmaceutical executives play the villainous roles once reserved for neo-Nazis, cocaine kingpins and gun-runners.

In an article in the June 8 New York Review of Books, “Death and the Drug Companies,” Angell lists a half dozen new books–with titles like Overdosed America, On the Take and Selling Sickness–that “make a damning case… against our whole system for developing, testing, and using prescription drugs.” Angell devotes most of her article to an overview of the anti-arthritis blockbuster Vioxx, which has triggered some 10,000 (!) lawsuits against its manufacturer Merck and which “exemplifies the problem” with prescription drugs. Angell’s article sums up the Vioxx debacle with two ads: one for Vioxx, featuring the beaming Olympic figure skater Dorothy Hamill; and another for a Texas law firm seeking clients harmed by Vioxx, spelled with a skull and crossbones in the “O.”

Angell seems less angry with Merck than with the Food and Drug Administration, which “has come to see itself as representing the drug companies, not the public.” Angell notes that “many members of FDA advisory committees are paid consultants for drug companies.” Of the six members of the FDA committee that helped get Vioxx approved in 1999, four had financial ties to Merck. Ten of the 32 members of an FDA panel convened in 2005 to reconsider Vioxx and similar drugs had ties to manufacturers, and all but one voted to allow the continued sale of the drugs.

Angell urges the FDA to make its inner workings more transparent and to “prohibit experts who consult for drug companies from sitting on its advisory panels.” But these reforms are unlikely to occur under the acting FDA commissioner, Andrew Von Eschenbach, a urologist from Texas and friend of George Bush. Bush’s administration has systematically stacked not only the FDA but many other regulatory and advisory bodies with “experts” whose main qualification consists of supporting Administration policies. The journalist Chris Mooney provides a partisan but accurate overview of this problem in The Republican War on Science, which I reviewed for the New York Times last December.

I can only give Angell a half-hearted pat for her New York Review of Books article, however, because she neglects to mention that medical journals have also been corrupted by drug-company money. In fact, as the Wall Street Journal Reported on May 15, Angell’s former employer the New England Journal of Medicine published a 2000 study of Vioxx that Merck used to market the drug; NEJM sold 900,000 reprints of the article, mostly to Merck, and for years declined to report on mounting concerns about the drug’s side effects. The indefatigable medical-research watchdog Vera Hassner Sharav of the Alliance for Human Research Protection says this episode “shatters the last glimmer of illusion about The New England Journal of Medicine as a bastion of scientific and moral integrity.”

I and other staffers and friends of the Center for Science Writings have begun compiling a list called “The Stevens 100 Greatest Science Books.” Written primarily by scientists but also by philosophers, historians and other scholars, these are books that stand out because of their subject matter, their rhetorical style and their impact on science and the rest of culture. The annotated list below includes our first 30 candidates for the list, which will eventually include 100 books.

In compiling the list, we’ve followed a few rules. The list includes only books published since 1900 (allowing us to include Interpretation of Dreams and Varieties of Religious Experiences, but regrettably eliminating the greatest science book of all time, On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, published in 1859). Books by journalists are eligible, although only one, Chaos by James Gleick, has made the list below. For now, we’re listing only one book per author, which forces some difficult choices. I’m sorry to say writings by Stevens employees are not eligible.

All lists like this are idiosyncratic, arbitrary, debatable, but that’s what makes them fun. Like everything we do at the Center, “Greatest Science Books” is intended to start a conversation about science writings. What makes a particular science book “great”? Is it primarily the power of its ideas and facts or of its rhetoric, that is, substance or style? How important are qualities such as authority, clarity, thoroughness, originality? If a book’s theories are not validated by subsequent research, should that book no longer be considered “great”?

We hope that readers will grapple with these questions, compliment or gripe about our list, tell us which candidates you like or hate, nominate your own candidates.For now, we’re listing books in alphabetical order, but eventually we may rank them according to merit, and we welcome your rankings. In my last post to this blog, I said I’d be giving out Whacks & Pats, whacks being criticism and pats praise. We welcome your whacks and pats!

Now, the list:

Bush, Vannevar, Science, The Endless Frontier, 1945. A physicist, prophet of the worldwide web and founder of the National Science Foundation, Bush argues that science is an infinite source of insight into and power over nature. He’s wrong, of course, but his vision served as the philosophical justification for massive post-war investment in science.

Chagnon, Napoleon, Yanamomo: The Fierce People, Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1968. One of the bestselling anthropology books of all time, Chagnon’s disturbing first-hand account of a violent Amazonian tribe challenges, to put it mildly, romantic notions of the peaceful noble savage.

Crick, Francis, The Astonishing Hypothesis, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1994. The co-discoverer of the double helix outlines a plan for reducing consciousness, science’s great bugaboo, to physical processes in the brain. Just as only the commie-basher Richard Nixon could re-establish relations with the China, so only the arch-rationalist Crick could make consciousness a respectable scientific subject.

Dawkins, Richard, The Blind Watchmaker, W.W. Norton, New York, 1986. Intelligent-design advocates should be required to read this book, in which Dawkins demonstrates the awesome power of natural selection in general and his selfish-gene hypothesis in particular to explain life. Dawkins’s arguments often seem prefaced with the implicit phrase “As any fool can see,” but he earns his haughtiness.

Dennett, Daniel, Consciousness Explained, Little Brown, Boston, 1991. Dennett is not as clever as he thinks he is–no one could meet that standard–and critics complain that Consciousness Explained Away would have been a more apt title. Dennett’s book is nonetheless a witty, imaginative exploration of the philosophical issues raised by modern neuroscience.

Diamond, Jared, Guns, Germs, and Steel, W.W. Norton, New York, 1997. The rare generalist who knows a lot about a lot of things, Diamond describes and explains the entire course of human history, contending that geography rather than race accounts for differential rates of development in different regions of the world.

Dyson, Freeman, Infinite in All Directions, Harper and Row, New York, 1988. The willfully, delightfully idiosyncratic physicist reflects on superstring theory, God, the origin of life, the long-term prospects for intelligent beings and other topics.

Einstein, Albert, The Meaning of Relativity, 1921. In this enduring classic, recently reissued in paperback with an introduction by physicist Brian Greene, the inventor (or is it discoverer?) of general relativity explains how his radical vision of space and time works.

Feyerabend, Paul, Against Method, Verso, London, 1975. One of the most loathed, misunderstood and brilliant of modern philosophers introduces his anarchic anti-philosophy, which he sums up with the phrase “anything goes.”

Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900 (in German). Regardless of its scientific merits, this book has had an irrevocable influence on science, psychology, the arts and all of culture. Question for scientist/authors: Would you rather be influential than right?

Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures, Basic Books, New York, 1973. Geertz not only floats the notion of cultures as “texts” and social science as a form of highly personal literary criticism; he also demonstrates how to pull off this tricky feat, which he has called “I-witnessing.” The downside is that Geertz has inspired countless pretentious, self-indulgent tracts by legions of social scientists lacking his literary skill.

Gleick, James, Chaos, Penguin Books, New York, 1987. A masterful mixture of character studies and scientific exposition, Gleick’s book is entertaining enough to attract a huge audience and rigorous enough to appeal to scientists.

Gould, Stephen Jay,Wonderful Life, W.W. Norton, New York, 1989. In by far his best book, the co-author of punctuated equilibrium–which critics fondly call evolution by jerks–dwells on a fossil site known as the Burgess Shale to make the case that contingency has played a crucial role in life’s history. As always, there is an amusing contrast between the florid sophistication of Gould’s prose and the simplicity of his message, which boils down to “Shit happens.”

Hawking, Stephen, A Brief History of Time, Bantam Books, New York, 1988. Often derided as the book that everybody buys and nobody reads, Brief History remains an authoritative, concise, witty reflection on whether physics can explain, well, everything.

James, William, Varieties of Religious Experience, 1903. As fresh now as when it was published a century ago, this extraordinary book remains the best attempt to explain spirituality from a rational, scientific and yet open-minded perspective.

Knuth, Donald, The Art of Computer Programing, 1968-present. Now a professor emeritus at Stanford, Knuth published the first installment of this multi-volume work, often called The Bible of programming, in the late 1960’s and is still adding updates.

Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, 1962. This sneaky, subversive assault on conventional notions of scientific truth and progress triggered a revolution itself within the philosophy of science. Be sure to note where Kuhn compares scientists to drug addicts.

Mandelbrot, Benoit, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, W.H. Freeman, New York, 1977. The former IBM mathematician and namesake of the Mandelbrot set helped to launch the fields of chaos and complexity with this bombastic, fascinating treatise on fractals, mathematical objects that can describe phenomena as diverse as clouds, capillaries and stock-market fluctuations.

Mead, Margaret, Coming of Age in Samoa, American Museumof Natural History, 1928. Mead’s book, published when she was still in her twenties and based on her field work among the Samoans, depicts them as peaceful, sensuous flower children uncorrupted by modern civilization. Mead has been criticized as a naïve and even dishonest ethnographic reporter who imposed her romantic, leftist, feminist ideology on this alien society. But she still has many defenders. And veracity aside, her book inspired many young people—more specifically, many young women–to become anthropologists. She made the field glamorous, sexy, intellectually thrilling, politically relevant.

Monod, Jacques, Chance and Necessity, Vintage, New York, 1972. The French Nobel laureate in biology wrestles with what may be the most important question in biology, or even all of science: Was our existence an inevitable consequences of the laws of physics and chemistry, or just a once-in-eternity fluke?

Penrose, Roger, The Emperor’s New Mind, Oxford University Press, New York, 1989. In this dense but fascinating book, one of modern physics’ most original thinkers argues that the brain is not just a conventional albeit very complicated computer but will require radically new physics to explain.

Popper, Karl, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Springer 1934. Scientists’ favorite philosopher, who denounced dogmatism but was notoriously dogmatic himself, introduces the concept of falsification as the fundamental criterion for distinguishing science from pseudo-science.

Rhodes, Richard, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Simon & Shuster, 1986. Rhodes’s book remains the definitive history of one of science’s most momentous achievements.

Russell, Bertrand, and A. N. Whitehead, Principia Mathematica, 1927. Recently reissued in paperback, this monumental work attempts to build mathematics from the ground up and to develop methods for the solution of all major outstanding problems. Although Godel’s theorem shattered Russell and Whitehead’s vision of mathematics as logically consistent and complete, Principia has nonetheless had an enduring impact on modern mathematics.

Sacks, Oliver, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Harper Perennial, New York, 1987. In his first book, the neurologist transforms the traditional form of medical case studies of brain-damaged patients into gripping forays into the mysteries of mind, knowledge and reality.

Schrodinger, Erwin, What Is Life?, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1944. These reflections by a physicist and quantum pioneer on the mysteries of biology turned out to be remarkably prescient, particularly the speculations about how cells store and transmit genetic information.

Watson, James, The Double Helix, Atheneum, 1968. It’s a truism now that world-class scientists are not rational automatons but can be as awkward, arrogant, lustful and nasty as the rest of us. But beginning with its infamous opening sentence (”I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood”), Watson’s first-person account of the discovery of the structure of DNA is still shockingly, refreshingly candid.

Weinberg, Steven, The First Three Minutes, Basic Books, New York, 1977. The Nobel laureate shows how astronomy and particle physics have converged to provide an astonishingly clear picture of the birth of the universe. In this book the atheist Weinberg comments, notoriously, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.”

Wiener, Norbert, Cybernetics, Wiley & Sons, New York, 1948. The MIT polymath Wiener not only coined the term “cybernetics”; in this magnum opus, subtitled “Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine,” he set forth ideas that continue to reverberate in electrical engineering, robotics, artificial intelligence, computer science, physics and biology.

Wilson, Edward O., Sociobiology, Harvard University Press, 1975. One of great scientists and prose stylists of the last century shows how evolutionary theory and genetics can account for the behavior of social animals, from ants to humans. Although they shun the term “sociobiology,” modern evolutionary psychologists remain indebted to Wilson’s seminal, controversial book.

The Columbia Journalism Review, published bimonthly by my alma mater, dishes out Darts for bad journalistic deeds and Laurels for good ones. I’m going to start issuing my own version of Darts & Laurels, which I’ll call Whacks & Pats. Whacks (as in upside the head) are bad and Pats (as in on the back) good. My first Pat goes retroactively to the Science Times for last Tuesday’s issue, reviewed in my last post.

My first Whack goes to New Scientist for “Better Than Human: The Technology to Enhance Our Bodies and Minds Is Here, So Why Settle for What You Were Born With?” This article in the May 13-19 issue predicts that by 2050 genetic engineering, nanotechnology, psychopharmaceuticals and brain chips will make us supersmart, superstrong, superhealthy, superhappy—superhuman! The author, Graham Lawton, suggests that this scenario is not just possible, or probable, but inevitable. “Most experts agree that human enhancement is coming,” he intones, “and that there is no off button for what we have started.”

The article fails to mention the catastrophic failure of gene therapy, the lack of progress in cancer treatments, the stagnation of therapies for mental illness. And the “experts” Lawton quotes include fanatics like Ray “I’m Going to Turn Into a Supercomputer!” Kurzweil and Aubrey “I’m Going to Live for Another 1,000 Years!” de Grey. They are priests within the cult of transhumanism, which upholds technological transcendence of the body’s natural limits as the route to human salvation.

For a slightly less credulous take on transhumanism, see an essay I wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education last year, “Brain Chips and Other Dreams of the Cyber-Evangelists.” Transhumanism is best understood as an escapist fantasy, which reflects an oddly dated, Jetsons-esque faith in scientific progress and its potential to cure all that ails us. Scientists should be helping us understand and solve all the problems that beset us–warfare, terrorism, overpopulation, poverty, environmental degradation, AIDS and other diseases–not distracting us with another religion disguised as science.

It’s my first official day as the Scientific Curmudgeon, and sifting through the slush pile of periodicals in my office I’ve found almost too much material to grouse about. Two examples: “Nano’s Big Future,” an infomercial—excuse me, article–on nanotechnology in the June National Geographic; and “Better Than Human,” a heavy-breathing riff on technologies that can enhance our minds and bodies, New Scientist, May 13-19. Both articles make the sort of exaggerated claims about science that drive me crazy; they resemble relics of the technophilic, go-go Nineties.

I’ll get to these pieces in later posts. But I want to start this blog on an upbeat note. The Science Times, published every Tuesday by the New York Times, consistently turns out well-reported, entertaining stories about wildly diverse topics; that’s why I urge all my students to read it. Today’s issue is no exception. The lead feature, “Home on the Range: A Corridor for Wildlife,” by Cornelia Dean, addresses the efforts of conservationists in the Canadian Rockies and elsewhere to create routes around cities and developments and across and under highways and railroads so that animals such as elk, bears and wolves can migrate and reproduce more freely. One biologist calls the Canadian program “sex across the highway.”

There’s a terrific profile by Benedict Carey of Thomas McGlashan, a Yale psychiatrist whose career path dramatizes his profession’s embarrassing lack of progress. Originally a proponent of talk therapy and especially psychoanalysis, McGlashan decided two decades ago that drugs were more effective for treating mental illness, but recently he has become disillusioned with drugs as well. Next, perhaps he’ll revisit shock therapy and lobotomies.

I also enjoyed Dennis Overbye’s essay on his fruitless search for a film that shows how truly cool science—and scientists–can be. Overbye himself, in his marvelous 1991 book Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, portrayed cosmologists such as Allan Sandage and Stephen Hawking as Promethean figures, obsessively trying to solve the riddle of existence. But no film, Overbye complains, has “accurately reproduc[ed] the grandeur and grit of science while ushering its practitioners into the ranks of coolness.”

It might not meet the accuracy criterion, but to my mind Altered States does a pretty good job dramatizing the scientific quest. In the film, loosely based on the life of the legendary neurophysiologist and wildman John Lilly, William Hurt tries to solve the Cosmic Riddle by gluing electrodes to his skull and consuming massive doses of exotic psychedelics in sensory-deprivation tanks. Scientists might object that the movie perpetuates the old Frankenstein stereotype of the scientist as transgressor, willing to sacrifice everything–his marriage, his life, the spacetime continuum itself!–for a glimpse of Truth. But Hurt is brilliant, brave, and sexy enough to make the lovely Blair Brown fall for him. That’s very cool.

A few years ago, a radio talk-show based in Houston called me for a chat about the relationship between science and religion. On the air, I said I wasn’t religious, but I also distrusted science when it pretended to have all the answers to our deepest questions about who we are, where we came from, where we’re going.

The host, a devout Christian, became annoyed with me. “You don’t believe in Jesus or God,” he said, “and you have doubts about science, too. So what do you believe in, Mr. Horgan?” For an awkward moment, the question left me stumped, then I said I believed in skepticism. “Well,” the host replied, “I’m skeptical, Mr. Horgan, skeptical of you and your ideas.”

It’s not always easy being a skeptic. Sometimes I think of my skepticism as a disorder, perhaps caused by a mutant gene, like being color blind or tone deaf. I’m missing the belief gene, and that’s why I can’t embrace Christianity, parapsychology, superstring theory, evolutionary psychology or psychopharmacology. I also occasionally envy believers, because after all science has demonstrated that faith has the power to heal, through the placebo effect. But then I remind myself of all the harm done throughout history by people with faith, whether in a religion or in pseudo-scientific theories such as Marxism, Social Darwinism or eugenics.

I was once an evangelical believer in scientific progress; in fact, that’s why I became a science journalist almost 25 years ago. Fields such as physics, artificial intelligence and genetics seemed to be bearing us toward a future in which bionic superhumans whiz around the cosmos in warp-drive spaceships. Science was an “endless frontier,” as the physicist Vannevar Bush, founder of the National Science Foundation, put it in his famous 1945 essay.

By the mid-1990s, however, skepticism had undermined my faith. I reluctantly concluded that science writers, including me, were presenting the public with an overly optimistic picture of science. By relentlessly touting scientific “advances”—from solutions to the riddle of cosmic creation to quantum theories of consciousness–and by overlooking all the areas in which scientists are spinning their wheels, we made science seem more potent and fast-moving than it really is. In The End of Science, published a decade ago, I argued that in attempting to solve mysteries such as the origin of the universe and of life and the nature of consciousness, science might be bumping up against fundamental limits.

I still see science as our best hope for understanding ourselves and the universe, and for creating, if not a sci-fi utopia, then at least a much better world. Scientists can provide us with cleaner, cheaper sources of energy; better treatments for cancer, AIDS and other diseases; more detailed accounts of how brains make minds. That’s why, in spite of writing a book called The End of Science, I’ve remained in the science-journalism racket, why I work at a science-oriented school, why I encourage young people to become scientists. But I also encourage greater recognition of science’s limitations and fallibility. It is precisely because science is so consequential that we must treat its pronouncements skeptically, carefully distinguishing the genuine from the spurious.

My goal in this blog—as in most of my writings–is to examine current events in science with “hopeful skepticism,” a term I originally coined in my second book, The Undiscovered Mind. Too much skepticism can culminate in solipsism, in a radical postmodernism that denies the possibility of achieving not only complete knowledge but any knowledge at all. Too little skepticism leaves us vulnerable to peddlers of scientific snake oil. But just the right amount of skepticism—mixed with just the right amount of hope–can protect us from our desire for answers while keeping us open-minded enough to recognize genuine truth when or if it arrives.