Sam Kean Biography

Sam Kean, a writer in Washington, D.C., spent years collecting mercury from broken thermometers as a child. His articles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Mental Floss, Slate, Air & Space/Smithsonian, and New Scientist. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Disappearing Spoon and The Violinist's Thumb. These volumes made the list of the year's top five scientific books on Amazon. The Violinist's Thumb was a finalist for the 2013 PEN/Wilson literary and scientific writing prize. The Disappearing Spoon finished runner-up for the 2010 Royal Society of London book of the year award. Also, he and his work have been discussed on NPR's Fresh Air, All Things Considered, and Radiolab. One of man's most significant scientific discoveries, the Periodic Table, is the subject of the book The Disappearing Spoon. Yet, it also has a wealth of tales of ardor, adventure, betrayal, and obsession. The book and Kean's presentations follow carbon, neon, silicon, and gold as they play out their roles in human history, money, mythology, war, the arts, poison, and the lives of the (sometimes) insane scientists who discovered them. The stories are contagious, and the details are remarkable. The audience learns that when Marie Curie used to bring her colleagues' wives into closets to observe her experiments using glow-in-the-dark materials, she would incite envy in them. Moreover, the poison in the ground may still be used to locate where Lewis and Clark slept after ingesting mercury capsules while traveling across the nation. How come Gandhi detested iodine? Why did the Japanese use cadmium-tipped rockets to kill Godzilla? And why did tellurium trigger the strangest gold rush in recorded history? Kean explores the tale of DNA in The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Hidden Stories of Love, War, and Genius, As Written By Our Genetic Code. Biology has been turned into history differently, but DNA offers a potent instrument for tracing our past. It has sometimes been complicated to decipher the genetic code; in fact, the subject of genetics has long been plagued with rivalries, conspiracies, and divisive beliefs. Nonetheless, scientists can now read the fantastic tales encoded in our DNA. These epic tales of our origin and evolution from primordial mud to the most potent species the earth has ever known have been inside us all along. The Violinist's Thumb considers the remaining unknowns in the future, particularly how this grand human experiment of uprooting everything there is to know about DNA will turn out. It begins in the distant microbial past, moves on to our animal ancestries, lingers over primates and hominid competitors like Neanderthals, and culminates with the emergence of modern, cultured human beings with flowery language and hypertrophied brains. With speeches in over twenty states and four other countries, Kean is a well-known speaker at museums, colleges, libraries, science conferences, literary festivals, and other events. He has even performed at a "science cabaret" because of his distinctive science perspective.

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