I am the moderator here. I was one of the judges from Los Angeles Times science and Technology Book price and its wonderful to read so many and have a conversation with these folks here today. We are going to get started in a couple of reminders. Please silence your cell phones, also personal recording is not allowed. All of our lovely authors will be available for signing books through the door. Im going to introduce our panelists and then we will have a conversation and the new guys will have a chance to ask questions. Im going to start here with thomas hager, Award Winning author with a history of science and medicine including the demand under the microscope. It is a courtesy professor of journalism and communication at the university of oregon. Next to him is marsha, her book, time fullness, she is a professor of geology and environmental studies at Lawrence University in appleton, wisconsin. She told me it is still snowing. Her journalism has been published in the news york times scientist american the guardian and the statesman among other publications and she lives in yorkshire, england. She wins the prize for having the hardest i think. Next is and pfizer and his book is a moment of grain all about sampeys awardwinning journalist who has appeared in the atlantic mother jones in the news york times among other publications and he gets the award for coming the shortest distance as he lives in los angeles. Just kind of wanted to get started here by talking about all of these books are about inanimate objects but they kind of function like characters in your looks. I was wondering if you guys could talk a little bit about how you chose these characters because they have to be very flexible. They end up being like Virginia Woolf orlando where they shave shape shift and travel through time and i wondered if you considered other characters and why not them and why the ones that you guys chose . We will go in order to my book as you might suspect involves 10 drugs more or less. I had 10 characters to choose from and actually you know what to choose when you write a book is always a difficult question for me but my editor came to me with this project. The editor Jamison Stoltz a very talented guy. He wanted to do a certain type of book and i wanted to do a different kind of look and we went back and forth. What he kind of wanted at the beginning sounded to me more like a greatest hits list of the 10 biggest drugs like the 10 best known drugs. But i happen to know a lot of those drugs have had books written about them. I wanted to do something that was surprising on one hand so i wanted to do things that hadnt been done in depth before and i wanted to do something that involved good stories because i write nonfiction and when you are writing about science to a broad audience you want a good story to tell to bring readers through a could be some tough material technically. I chose based on what i found interesting personally and in what i thought the entertainment value would be. With those two things in mind ten drugs tells a larger story about the development of medicine as well. He it was a chess game. Moving pieces around. Marcia. I spent a lot of time in the company of rock. [laughter] timmy rocks are characters. They have Amazing Stories to tell and i spent a lot of my adult life trying to learn there are strange complicated language i think a big part of our problem is not society environmentally and existential way. I would argue its not seeing the Natural World is something that his agency and character. To me, learning the names of things is the beginning of having a more intimate relationship with the Natural World and thats the start of a cultural shift that we need. [inaudible] i am an accidental scientist. Ive written a little bit about science. It was very different axes we were finding people who work in that industry whether they were working in development they are delighted that anybody shows any interest in them whatsoever. [laughter] so becomes very easy and luckily and sanitation there are lots of people who have developed quite a good sense of humor so its perfect for me. Plus there are so many people who work in metacolin scientists so its very difficult to triage. Again like thomas said a lot of it was out of personal interest and one of the secrets of writing books is a her proposal probably looks nothing like your finished book and i think thats a good thing because organic way of my change on the way. For example one of my favorite characters which we will talk about had a very good book about blood which just said there was a blood named after her and i thought or how did you get the blood named after yourself so was accidental happenstance and luck really. I second that. I actually had a lot of trouble with that. This is the first book ive written and ive been writing magazine stories for many years. Like rose im just a writer and a journalist. Im not any kind of real scientists that i wound up writing a lot about science. Especially in the magazine game. Your editors are ours leaning on you to find a narrative to find human characters doing some exciting thing and do use their story as an excuse to talk about this larger technological or political issue or whatever. I wanted doing this book which is in large part about the different ways our civilization depends on sand. Concrete is made of sand, glasses made of sand. Silicon chips are made of sand. All these things that are really interesting in and of themselves but they are kind of sort of disconnected. I spent a long time trying to figure out who is the flu thats going to carry me through this . Ive got to find the one person researcher or builder or something that i can tell a dramatic story and have them pull it together. Nobody makes microchips and makes concrete and build artificial land so i was stuck on that for a while. I actually read an essay by Bill Mckibben who probably some of you have heard about the great food writer. Not Bill Mckibben, im sorry michael pollen. I love the literary chuckle. Anyway michael pollen writes a lot about food and one of the things that he said he addressed that exact question. I feel like process can be a character in a inanimate objects to be a year. Just follow the and i thought thats a great idea. Of course sand itself is the character and then i just had to figure out how to expand that out to the metaphor that i came up with to hold this book together i hope is sand as an army. Because we have concrete. Concrete is the main thing we stand for. You can use any old stanford that so those are the foot soldiers and there are millions and billions. Glass and is a more refined kind of sand was special forces all the way to the stand we use for silicon chips which is rare and hardtofind sand. These guys are like s. E. A. L. Team six of the sand world. It starts to sound more adjusting the just plain old sand. One thing that was interesting about your book that i didnt know before was we are running out of sand. You want to explain that and how thats possible . Do i ever. [laughter] heres the thing about sand. Sound like the most boring thing in the world but its actually the most important solid substance on earth. Our civilization literally depends on it. Number one is what concrete is made of. The building we are sitting and some of the entire city we are in pretty much every Shopping Center apartment block Office Center made in the world today is made partly with concrete which is mostly sand stuck together and also glass. Every piece of glass and all this other stuff that first and foremost and far most important we are using concrete. We use unbelievable amounts of concrete to build cities. We are building cities around the world in the developing world today on a scale that has never happened remotely before. So there is a lot of sand in the world obviously but the there are more and more people in this world all the time and more in our moving into the cities all the time we are having the equivalent of eight new york citys added to the planet every year. Imagine every building, every road, every sidewalk airport and runway in new york city we are putting down that much concrete and adding that much concrete to the planet every single year. We are using about 60 billion tons of sand every year. There is a lot of that but when youre talking about amounts that large sooner or later you start to run out and thats whats starting to happen. There is so much demand for sand we are riverbeds and beaches they are all over the world causing environmental damage and in some places its gotten so bad the black market has taken over and organized crime has taken over the sand business and hundreds of people have been murdered over sand of all things. Yeah and so one thing that was really interesting was to think about sand running out and what was interesting about a lot of these books as we talk about our modern moments in these books were ways to talk about our modern moments but also about the fact that this now of concrete buildings and highways it hasnt always been the case. One thing that was interesting about marshs book is the argument about the way that we interact with the past and also the present. The book is called timefulness and i was looking see what you meant by that concept. See eyetoeye claimed that name. Its something we should aspire to the outside the realm of time but its ultimately a sterile idea. Everything has a past and evolves and is more interesting because of that history and that really is the way geologists see the world and think. One metaphor i often use in the intro to geology class is that of a obsessed texts which some of you know when paper didnt exist in most writing was done on parchment it was very expensive to produce so instead of throwing a document away it would be scraped off and reinked but underneath there would be vestiges of the older writings remaining. Thats very much the way geologists see rocks and landscape. Its complex text in which the pass is very much present in can be read when one learns to read that so the idea of time fullness understanding how things came to be is what i intended and most geologists the vast explanatory power of geology is what attracted us to the field. I sometimes call it the etymology of the world. Theres something satisfying about being able to look out and understand how things came to be , these arbitrary things. The thing that blew my mind was the story of how the himalayas were created and the shortest time. You want to tell the story and put it into perspective . When one sees the earth from topdown and over geologic time you can see its very much. Diana and changing and one of the remarkable things about this planet is how the tectonic properties driven from the internal heat in the earth is still going on and are almost exactly matched with the russians on the case of the himalayas which are the greatest mountains on the planet today being formed as the subcontinent of india constructed partly beneath asian amounts are rising but the ocean is tearing them down nearly as fast and eroded the himalaya over the last 50 years lying on the ocean floor into great submarine band so while out or put up for at the ocean for thousands of kilometers and represent more material than the modern mountains. Amounts are growing and they are being eroded and the metaphor i use in the book is like someone sitting in a barbers chair and their hair is growing as fast as the barber can cut it. There are more clippings on the ground than there are in the head which i thought was an interesting thing. I dont know if you drove over the 101 in the melrose bridge but he was talking about looking at the cracks of the caltrans guys. Maybe you can freak out the rest of our audience. One more thing to worry about. [laughter] all that concrete that our world is built on is breaking down. Concrete is a very new building material. I had no idea but its only the last 100 odd years that we have been using reinforced concrete to build all of this stuff. Before that it was brixton timber and more traditional building methods and concrete just revolutionized buildings. Its easy to work with. Relatively cheap to make and so as we all know its taking over the world. The problem is it doesnt last. It looks like stone but its not as solid and not nearly as durable as stone and if its not well made and people often cut corners and making it. This way all of the concrete in the world is going to need to be replaced within the next 50 to 100 years. So think about that for a second. In the book i went out with caltrans, the folks who manage the highways here. They have a team of people who do nothing but go around and check on elevated roadways and they are constantly playing catchup. If you driven around l. A. You know those things are falling apart. They are full of cracks and full of potholes and nobody wants to put any money into fix them. There is no political glory and patching cracks so its a really big problem and especially in parts of the developing world like china where they are notorious for putting up and building cities at an incredibly fast rate that using shoddy methods. We are talking about billions and billions of tons of concrete , countless buildings, dams runways everything you can think of that is slowly breaking down and is going to need to somehow be replaced. We are already running short of sand and doing environmental damage to build up the world that we are building. Soon within the next 50 to 100 years we are going to have to come up with that much again. Can i add to the bad news briefly . The other component cement the aggregate sand is the limestone which has to be heated so that it can drop co2 so concrete production is the second biggest contributor to greenhouse gases. I thought it was the third biggest. With all fuels combined and then concrete. Its really bad. Another general theme was this idea for a doubleedged sword to a lot of scientists are so saying it makes us better a society or board gets a lot of times in the book you talk about theirs is great progress but there are also these negative unintended consequences. Rose i was thinking would you tell the story about the plasma and the hemophiliacs . I am interested in progress. Rightly or wrongly. One of the things i was very interested in how the modern blood supply in the industrialized world came about, which is when you think about it an extremely astonishing thing. We have something that is pretty banal these days which is having a transfusion or giving blood. When you think about it there are millions of people giving away a body part to a perfect stranger who they have never met or will never meet for no money. An interesting business model. The u. S. Does everything differently so in the u. S. What happens is after the Second World War when this model was called a nonarray numerator to volume of blood supplies a given year blood for free and not expecting anything in return but a cookie in the orange drink was the kind of fork in the road because what happened was your blood if you let it sit the red blood will sink to the bottom end of the top you will get this yellow stuff which is plasma. It doesnt look like much but it contains lots of very useful proteins in things that can be turned into lucrative pharmaceuticals. In the u. S. What happened was the plasma industry grew up in convinced people that even though was considered an anathema to sell your blood you cant really sell it in the u. S. Its not accepted socially anymore but you can sell your plasma. The u. S. You can sell your plasma twice a week which is the most frequent level allowed in the entire world. No one else thinks thats advisable or safe. And the u. S. Has been called the opec of plasma. The u. S. Supplies the world 80 of the worlds plasma exported around the world. This is not usually plasma but transfusion. Its very useful if you need the blood to clot but it makes pharmaceutical products. One of the things that was made in the 1970s which was an absolute revelation for people who had hemophilia which is a condition where you have a defect which means your blood cannot clot. Assuming you cut yourself shaving but it means you have internal bleeding and its extremely painful agonizing and crippling. Its also used to be fatal early on in life. But then as thing came about discovered in plasma which was called factor eight. Enable lead to clot. It was an extremely magical product. Most people with hemophilia suddenly theyve been forced when they would leave it have to go to the hospital for weeks on end. They were in agony and their treatment was very difficult. Suddenly this thing called factor came about. They could treat themselves at home. On youtube there are videos of young kids injecting the stuff with big grins on their faces. And it was absolutely magical. Transform the lives of hemophiliacs around the world but now what it also did was gave thousands upon thousands of millions around the world hiv and hepatitis as well. The trouble is plasma to get enough plasma you need tens of thousands of donations because its so concentrated. In the 1970s in the u. S. It was a good idea if you got plasma from four example prisoners. There was one prison in arkansas where the president said they were milked like cows. They would come into the cell and they were given money and also plasma was sold by people who were in poor health may be on skid row called boos boos. The reason we think of voluntary blood supply is the safest because you are paying someone for blood or plasma then they may be encouraged not to tell you the truth about how healthy they are because they want the money for the next dose. This had terrible consequences around the world. Thousands of hemophiliacs died. There was a college in the uk which was specifically for young boys with hemophilia. I think they was the class of 75 and i think about 17 died. A really horrific death toll. The england and uk has been absolutely disgraceful and how it treats these people. It was understood very quickly within a few years they you could get rid of hiv by heat treating the plasma. Some Companies Including lots of Big Companies controlling the plasma industry. They knew this and they continued sending out the tainted products around the world. It was exported to hong kong and to canada. And people died. Because of its business decision it was absolutely a business decision. They wanted to get rid of the blood plot on their shelves so was absolutely shameful, really terrible, terrible warping of what was a wonderful progress in science. People are still dying in the uk is only just inquiring. In the u. S. Its been that way. Everybody sues everybody. [laughter] but canada sets up a comprehensive inquiry that over time the supply system fires people. Its ongoing and its really shameful. In your look you have a lot of stories about the doubleedged