>> good afternoon.

i'm jim cornell, the president of the international science association and co-chair of the science and health book committee for the fourth annual tucson festival of books. my co-chair is daphne gilman who's here in the audience, and you'll see more of her good work if you go down to science city at the far end of the mall. we go beyond books, and we talk about science here. the, this is one of several, actually nine c-span programs to be broadcast live from this location plus live streams from somewhere else on the campus, and i want to give a warning to our c-span audience out there in video land, because we're going to be talking about blood and guts and murder and mayhem and sexual perversion, government malfeasance, medical malpractice. so you may think you've tuned into a reality show or perhaps -- [laughter]

a presidential primary debate -- [laughter] don't touch that dial. [laughter] you're on the right cable channel, and we're going to be talking about some serious science with some serious authors. deborah blum, the author of "the poisonous handbook," to my far left. douglas starr, "killer of little shepherds." obviously, doug is the one in the muddle. [laughter] and holly tucker, "blood work." we're going to be doing a little genre blending also because these books are a mixture of science, history and true crime. and we're going to look at some real serious issues about human frailty, institutional failures and personal courage and perseverance on the part of individual science terrorists and -- scientists and researchers. i'd like to start with the, perhaps the oldest crime first. we're going to go back to 17th century france where a renegade

surgeon named jean-baptiste denny did one of the world's first transfers, transfusions of blood. in his case it was to a prominent madman in paris. unfortunately, it failed, and it touched off a cultural and political debate that went on in france for two centuries and has repercussions even today. the author of this work is holly tucker, she's a professor at vanderbilt university in nashville where she is with the center for science, history of science and medicine. >> medicine, health and society. >> medicine, health and society. and she's also a professor of the history of italian and french with a specialty in the history of medicine. her book, which is a wonderful narrative, has just been i was

told today has just been nominated for los angeles times book award. the awards will be on april -- >> 20th, i think. >> april 20th, and it's up in the science and technology nonfiction. holly, why don't you tell us a little bit about this book and starting off our historical tour here. >> sure. well, first, thanks to the tucson book festival for the chance to be here and to, um, be with two fantastic authors whose work i admire a lot as well. so i started writing this book several years ago primarily as a study of the history of blood. and it soon took a life of its own. i noticed through research and also serendipity is that the first blood transfusions took place in the 17th century, specifically as a response in many ways to the discovery of blood circulation in 1628 by william harvey. from there people wanted to test the idea of blood circulation,

so they started putting fluids -- all types of things, liquor, booze, opium, milk, water -- into the veins of dogs. because the idea in the 17th century is that blood -- and if you think about early medicine, right? the first thing you think about is leeches, right? and you also think about lance ets and blood let'sing, so the very point of putting blood in made no sense to the early 7th century mind. -- 17th century mind. but they needed to test harvey's idea. the way they tested it was testing the earlier predecessors who believed that blood, of course, did not circulate, but rather was the product of the digestive system. so you ate food, it went into the stomach, it got purified into the liver, into the red-gold of blood, and then it made a one-way trip up to the heart where the heart served as a furnace, blood was burned off.

you breathe out to get rid of the fumes. so when harvey came up with the idea that blood actually circulated, it was revolutionary. the way they wanted to test that is they started injecting all these liquors into the veins of animals because it was thought if it made a one-way trip, the animals wouldn't be stoned or drunk. well, they soon found out that was not the case. and from there they started to toy with the idea of then taking the blood of one with species and putting it into another, and actually animal into human which always seems quite odd. but for the early modern mindset it makes sense because animals don't drink, they don't smoke, they don't swear, the blood is pure, right? [laughter] and soon those experiments took on a life of their own both in france and in england. and the case that i look at in this book is the case, as you mentioned, jim, it was the third time that blood had been

transfused, the first was this a young boy who was feverish, the second was in a butcher. it was purely just to see what would happen, and the third was the transfusion of calf's blood into a mental ill man, the thought was it would cool down the humors that made him ill. well, he died, no surprise, after the third transfusion. and what interested me specifically in this story is that the court cases all said that, well, why was there a court case? the transfusionist was called up on murder charges. and it's one of the earliest examples that we have of a malpractice case. so the french courts actually looked at the case, it went into appeals x it was determined that there had been a murder. but the transfusionist had not killed his patient, rather three unnamed physicians had had a hand in poisoning the madman. and historians have typically

looked at this case and said, what in the world? but they don't look at the murder. what they typically looked at was that blood transfusion after the case was tried was banned in france. and then later petered out entirely in england. and they say, well, of course, it was banned. because it was before anesthesia, it's before antisepsis, what in the world were they doing? but that's not really the story in my mind. the story is why would three physicians be interested in putting a man to death? why would they be interested in poisoning him? one of the things i found was the answers are really interested and have a lot to do with deep-seated fears. it's one of the best early murder mysteries you can find. >> thank you, holly. we're going to come back at the end, of course, and ask some more questions, you'll have a chance to ask questions too. i want to go back -- actually, jump ahead a little bit, two

centuries, still saying in france. to doug starr's books about the beginnings of forensic medicine. doug is -- i should have made this full disclosure before, all these speakers are colleagues of mine, so i do have a bias about their back books and their performance here. but doug is a longtime friend of mine and a longtime veteran journalist who is now a co-director of the center for science and medical writing at boston university in boston. he has written for magazines of a range from -- i love it, "sports illustrated" to smithsonian and everything in between, so he's had quite an experience. and his previous book, "blood: an epic history of medicine and commerce," was made into a pbs special. it won an l.a. book award x this current book is also an award winner. it just received the golden

dagger award from the british crime writers' association for the best nonfiction crime book of last year, 2011. doug, why don't you tell us about the origins, the thesis of this book. >> i should say that by the time i was finishing this book i was having nightmares on a regular basis. [laughter] it wasn't supposed to happen. but my previous book involved the history of medicine, and i was mucking around as we do, and one day i was in the basement of harvard medical school just going through journals about the history of medicine, and i came across the case of joseph shay who in the 1890s killed twice as many people as jack the ripper. but he's not famous because they eventually caught him. and that's not a spoiler, because it doesn't matter. and then i read about his nemesis who was one of the founders of forensic science as we know it and the greatest forensic scientist of his day. now, by colleague, deb blum, had the good fortune of finding protagonists in new york city

who would appeal to an american audience. i had to go to lyon, france. the french and the austrians and the italians and the germans pretty much invented forensic science. so this is the story of good guys versus a bad guy. because in the years that these people were p developing all the techniques that you see in csi -- except for dna -- this pathological killer was on the loose. what i liked about this was, and i think part of the reason people like turn-of-the-century books is because many of the concerns we have now were present then. you had a widening gap between the haves and have notes, at the same time emerging middle class, the department store was invented, tabloid newspapers were invented, so you had the yellow press amping up every issue into hysteria. people felt that crime was on the rise, although it really budget, just as they do now.

there were debates about capital punishment. so this is the kind of two stories of the forensic scientist, especially the doctor, as they were developing this science, and this madman on the loose in france, and they eventually come together. and it was the first serial killer caught by scientific techniques. the trial was the first such trial featuring the insanity defense. there were previous trials, but nothing like this. and when they found him guilty and took him to the guillotine, the die section of his brain became one of the biggest scientific controversies in europe because then as now people thought there must be some structure in the brain that would compel somebody to do something so insane. so this is the two stories of the scientist, developing new scientist, the serial killer and the science that resulted as a result of it. and we'll get to the nightmares later. [laughter] >> thank you, doug. now we're going to jump way ahead to the 20th century, modern times, but

the early 20th century when forensic science was still in its infancy. and as deb blum tells in her book, sort of a combination of bad laboratory science and sloppy detective work made poisoning the sort of perfect crime. you could almost get away with murder literally. and deb is going to talk about, as her book does, about the beginnings of how in the united states how a very brilliant, a very dedicated public servant and a brilliant toxicologist, the chief medical examiner of new york city and his partner, the toxicologist, developed what we know today as forensic science. deb was here, it was interesting she was here when the hardcover version came out back in 2010 and presented now the paperback is here, i'm happy to welcome her back to this stage. deb? >> well, i'd like to start, also, by thanking the tucson festival of books and saying what a privilege and pleasure it is to be on a panel with two

such wonderful, fascinating authors. my book is set in the united states and, in fact, that ended up being one of the difficult quests i set for myself when i wanted to tell this story. i was interested in the fact that we take for granted living in a csi age. we believe that there are scientists who will help solve crimes. we believe that given any crime scene there will be scientific experts who can go out and help the police figure out what happened. but the fact is that forensics is a very new science, um, and in the united states we didn't even train people in the forensics until the 1930s. and the first forensics program in the country was started by my two little scientists who were -- i don't know how little they were, but, you know, i always think of them that way, who were civil servants in new york city just trying to build a program. but when i started, i was seeing it set against what was going on

in europe. europe was the home in the beginning of forensic medicine, and i started saying to myself, well, surely someone in the united states at some point tried to bring that here. and it took me four months of going through footnotes and going to archives and hunting down internal documents from scientific societies to eventually find charles miller and alexander getler. the other thing i wanted to tell you is i really started this book, and it makes me sound twisted, very twisted for someone who is, you know, a professor of journalism at the university of wisconsin. it makes me sound twisted, but i've always been really interested in poison. [laughter] i always really, really, really wanted to write a book that looked at how cool poisons are. they're fascinating, chemically fascinating. because we're surrounded -- we live in this a world of -- in a world of chemistry. we're constantly surrounded by chemical compounds, and most of

them do us no harm so the ones who do will have to be really clever. they have to figure out a way to unlock the differences of the -- the defenses of the body. they have to take advantage of who we are. and that was the thing that really set he off on this quest. i wanted to write a hand bach of poisons -- handbook of poison, every chapter is a poison, and i wanted to tell the story of how we figured out how to catch poison killers. because doug is right, at the turn of the 20th century, we didn't know how to do that. and at the start of my story, in fact, the city of new york issued a report saying the clever poisoner can operate with impunity in new york city. so i was interested in learning how we would change that. >> i'd like to, some of you have already answered this in a general way, i wanted to ask why this particular subject which in

many cases is totally unknown to us. certainly the formation of the forensics unit new york city, deb is a pulitzer or prize winner who's written about primates, about sex studies, i mean, much like doug has gone across this full spectrum. why did this one pop out particularly? >> well, i actually, again, it makes me sound kind of creepy, really had always said to myself i'm, at some point i'm going to write about poisons. part of that, you know, i started out as a chemistry major. i'm a famously failed chemistry major. i'm a total klutz, so i can't do too much damage to anyone at a laptop, but i set my hair on fire first thing out when i started chemistry lab, and they had to evacuate the laboratory at florida state thanks to some of my brilliant work there. [laughter] so i thought, okay, i'm never going to survive this. but eventually i came back to it. i came back to it because, yeah,

i find it, like i said, find it fascinating and intriguing, and i think there was something else for me. one, i love as someone who writes science history, i love being able to find the stories of our past that we have forgotten, to find these amazing scientists, and no one remembered who effected a paradigm shift in the united states, who built the science of forensics. i mean, what could be more seductive for a writer than that, to find these people and bring them back to life? and then to subversively weave poison and murder throughout the story. and then that was the other thing. i love murder/mysteries, so the chance to spend two years telling murder stories, could anyone have more fun, right? [laughter] and so i did that too. >> doug, you know, this notion of bringing somebody from the hidden parts of history and getting them the recognition they deserve, i think, is

something we all share. holly did it, deb did it, i do it, what happens is you find a character, and you say this person's story needs to be told. and the first thing i found when i came upon the professor, he kind of exemplified the values of his age. the other thing that grabbed me partway through is i've always been a sherlock holmes fan, and i thought, boy, it'd be great to find someone involved in this at the time when conan doyle was writing the stories. a professor in charge of graduate three cease, it turns out from his journals that he was a sherlock holmes fan. and then it turned out that one of his students did a thesis on how good is the science of scherr -- her lock holmes in these modern times? also i had found the doctor's handwritten remarks about what he thought about sherlock holmes. so here was the fictional

scientist/detective who had been the hero of my youth being commented on by a scientist/detective who was the hero of my book. it was just too delicious. by the way, i should say that the doctor loved the stories. he said holmes never conducted an autopsy, what is that? he said, number two, holmes works alone. nobody in this field works alone. we need chemists and end molingses and bone doctors, we need to work as a team. and the final thing he said, you know, there's no women in this story. what is it about the parish? [laughter] british? [laughter] >> ollie, what was your experience? >> what was interesting to me is when i listen to the two of you talk about your characters, there's a good amount of adoration you have, these are sleuths, they were out to find the truth. my characters are, actually, very interesting because they exemplify, i think, some of the

worst we see in scientific research, the arrogance. this shows the time period in the depths of the scientific revolution when the french and the english were at each other's throats, something of an early space race. whoever could get to nature's truths and unlock them first would be able to show the dominance of their respective countries, and some of them are just sneaky and sharkmy and back standing. and the main character of this nonfiction book, you know, i admire him, am amazed by him and also think what in the world were you thinking? he is the most hubris-filled character you can find. he's a man of low berth who with could not be admitted into the paris school of medicine. the paris school of medicine was only for noble people. so he ends up going to school in month pell year, i don't know

what the rival school is in arizona, but you know the rival universities where all the dummies go -- >> we don't mention it here. [laughter] >> okay. well, wherever that school is where all they do is drink and carouse -- [laughter] and they're just stupid. [laughter] and that's, essentially, where jean-baptiste went to school, and he knows better. he knows he can't be part of the paris medical elite, but that doesn't stop him from going to paris, that doesn't stop him -- you know the best way to get your parents' attention if you're a child is to do exactly what you don't want the parents to do or to throw a temper tantrum -- and cha's sort of what he was doing scientifically. the paris school of medicine did not like the idea of circulation, can could not imagine the idea of circulation, so the first thing he does is these transfusions on the bank of the seine.

it's not that they have any answers right. i mean, this is not the glorious story of forward-looking narrative that science got it right, this is a moment where the thing that we all imagine not being able to live without in the medical community of blood transfusion is that it created such a panic and such a controversy. that's why i would love to find that -- did your guys wear a superhero cape? >> totally. and they flew. [laughter] >> and i've always found one of the great things about research is discovering something i had no idea i was going to discover. this occur to all of you at that same moment as you're going through your research for these books? >> not every moment in my book is, you know, a glorious celebration of either science or human beings actually. one of the things that stood out for me as a researcher -- my book is set mostly in the

1920s. it's called, i think the subtitle the birth of forensic medicine in jazz age new york. so it's set in the prohibition era. as you can imagine -- as we all know, prohibition didn't work all that well. although there was laws to prohibit commerce and drinking and trafficking in alcohol, people drank like fishes, if fishes drink. never sure. and they, there were in new york city from the time that the 18th amendment went into effect until it ended 30,000 illegal speakeasies were formed. and in that particular system there's this enormous flooding in the united states of bootlegged alcohol much of which is really poisonous. partly because people, if i grew up in north georgia where there were a lot of moonshiners, and as you know, everything depends on what you put in the still. so if you're putting in good grain, you're getting out pretty

good grain whiskey. if you're putting in wood which is what wood alcohol is, you're getting meth them alcohol, and when people were desperate to drink despite the government rules, they distilled everything. they distilled their furniture. they distilled sweeping from furniture factories. they just -- i don't want to say they distilled their neighbors, but they would distill anything they could get their hands on, and famously some them distilled poison ivy in the winter when they couldn't get anything else and served it up. to the country is awash in really poisonous alcohol. and one of the things i discovered was that the u.s. government then deliberately made this much worse because the other way that people would get alcohol is bootlergs would steal it from industrial alcohol factories. by 1926 there was about 60 million gallons of alcohol being stolen so that it could be

refined and redistributed by bootlergs. and what the u.s. government did to enforce prohibition at that point was they required the alcohol makers to add poisons that couldn't be distilled out. and you can actually still find these formulas. and within months there's this epidemic of deaths across the country. and my scientists in their better moments are crusading against this. but literal hi in new york city alone in one year more than a thousand people were killed by the government alcohol program. and when you go into the newspapers of the time, you see, you know, the newspapers are saying, well, the 18th amendment is the only u.s. amendment that carries the death penalty. or this is the boar ya congress because people are dying all over the country. so that reenvisioning of what had really been going on and that understanding of the way government policies are made and whether goth policies -- and i

think all of us ask this today which leads me to my other point -- does this government really protect us? right? does everything the government does protect us from what's most dangerous, and are there government actions that make that worse? and that's really something that is the other thing i learned from doing this book. you know, we live in a keep call world. we're still -- chemical world. we're still trying to figure out how to-and-a-half -- to navigate that world. and so a lot of the questions that my scientists raise and tried to figure out are questions we saw asked today and are still trying to figure out how to answer. >> i would cat eyes that question in two ways. one is moments of discovery and the other is things i discovered. my way of doing research is to

tramp around. so i went to france, and i visited the villages, i went to the courthouse and got -- there were crates and crates of records preserved from the 1890s, and i simply photographed thousands of documents and handwritten old french which i later took home and translated. and i would find the descendants of people. so one moment of discovery that stands out is i found the doctor's great, great, great grandchildren. one is a superior court judge in lyon, the other is a doctor in another town. she was a very proper woman, and i told her i was doing a history that would bring her ancestors recognition, and we spoke. and the next time i visited her we had one of these moments where we were talking at length, and she finally said, monsieur, i have a couple of boxes of his things. you wouldn't be interested, would you? [laughter] and i tell my journalism

students there are times when you have to restrain yourself, and this is not a time when you lunge across the room and grab the box. you are just as restrained and say, well, if it wouldn't be a bother. [laughter] and i found such interesting things about her great, great, great, great grandfather. he had this very strange sense of humor that i never would have found from his scientific papers. so there was a beautiful bronze paperweight in the shape of a woman's hand, and i said what was that? she said, oh, that was the bronze casting of a hand of a female criminal, and he thought it was a lovely hand. a couple years later when i went to visit the son who lives in the family's traditional house hundreds of miles away, you know, preserved as though his grandfather was there, i found a door knocker. and it was the same hand, and it never -- another up with of the things they did was in an effort to understand the criminal mind, they studied the lingo they spoke, you know, they dissected the brains, they looked at their

habits and also their tattoos because tattoos in europe at the time were a fairly novel thing brought back from the sailors who had gone to the far east and the islands. and the doctor made the first scientific descriptions of tattoos, he categorized thousands of them, and they were recognized by americans as a source of it, and there was a complete set of dinner ware in this box, and on each set was a tattoo. and i said, what's this? she said, well, he thought it would be fun when he would have the tattoos from the criminals replicated on our dinner ware. [laughter] so you'd be at a sunday dinner at the house, come to the bottom of the beef bower begin krone, and in french it would say death to all officials. [laughter] this is an interesting thing. and it was con stand. you know, going into the countryside i found one of the villages where he committed the

worst crime, the one that really got him executed, and i met some old farmers there. and the interesting thing there was when you go overseas and especially meet rural people, it's very difficult to win their trust. so i had to go through a man in lyon who knew the mayor in that town who after interviewing me for an hour said let me introduce you to these old guys, and they had grandparents who remembered the case. we speak for an hour, and it all takes a long time. they said, would you like to see the scene of the crime? i wanted it for the book to be accurate. and they take me to the scene of the crime. here's where it happens, there's the cascade, here's where the cows came. and i had one of these wonderful moments of discovery. i said, monsieurs, i'm not sure about this. well, i have the occupancy report, and it says -- autopsy report, and it says they found the body under a walnut tree.

and they said, yes, this was a walnut tree, it was cut down in 1938. you're standing on top of it. so that was good. [laughter] this terms of the things that really struck me like holly and like deb, the thing that really struck me is how modern all of this was. the techniques they used or still use today, the scrupulous nature which he and his colleagues cordoned off a crime scene, did careful autopsies, took organs back to the laboratory and tested them scientifically was quite amaze, and the whole quest to understand the criminal mind. when i brought some of their findings to a neurologist at beth israel hospital in boston on the faculty of harvard and said what do you think of these findings, he said these guys were brilliant. they didn't have our technology, but they were every bit as smart as we were. so that was revealing. >> i love the idea of separating

moments of discovery from the things you discover, and i think that the research process for me, there wasn't a day that i didn't stumble across something. nothing earth shaking, right? nothing earth shattering, but small bits. what did the carriages look like, spending time -- paris is called thety of lights for a reason, because in 1667 kink -- king louis decided he was tired of paste being the crime cap -- paris being the crime capital of europe. and, you know, that makes a difference to the writing because if you have people moving through the city of paris before the streets are lit up versus when they were, um, things look differently. you feel a heck of a lot less scared in crime-ridden paris. so, you know, i would spend moments trying to figure out, you know, what -- how did they light them? did they put them up on the walls? how would -- what time of day would they put them on, how long

would the wax have lasted, right? those are the small bits and detailing. the things you discover are not usually radical, but they're so important. you know, a good portion of the book takes place in 17th century england, london as well as in france, and little details i'm working with major figures in the history of science. robert boyle, the father of chemistry. what do i have to say about boyle, and how do i put flesh on his bones? well, you start reading hot of letters, and you start reading the smallest of accounts, and you're listening for details that probably go unnoticed by many people. boyle, it turns out, was unmarried, lived with his sister and to hear people describe being if his lab, he was a slob. things were lying all around. there were bits used to distill his stuff. those are small details that help get into the minds of the characters you're describing, so it turns into a detailed

narrative that you have to listen for. but moments of discovery, this was a book that almost wasn't, and i can talk about now that it's in print, and my editor would have had a heart attack had she known what was going on. so at the, the heart of the book is involving a -- solving a case, who were these three physicians who plotted to kill one of the first patients of transfusion and why did they do it. well, when i wrote the book proposal and how one goes about writing, presenting nonfiction books for major new york houses, you write a very lengthy proposal, it takes months and months and months to write, and i was pretty darn certain i knew who did it. so i wrote the proposal with that in mind. keep in mind, you present the book to the house without having all the research flushed out. is that not how it works for you guys too? right. so then the rough part of my job is i have to go to london, i

have to go to paris, i think i squeezed a another trip out of it, and i spent quite a bit of time in the archives at the academy of sciences in paris. and the person i was thinking who did it had a close connection to it, and i was sure in my arrogance that i would find something. i dug, i dug, i dug, never found anything. went back home, kept -- to nashville, kept digging around. i couldn't find a trace of anything, and i was devastated. i spent a couple months being very cranky. my husband didn't like being around me too much because i was, like, i've got this book, people counting on me, i have a murder that needs to be solved, i don't know who it is, and, you know, it's nonfiction, and it has to be true. and i have a responsibility, i have an ethical responsibility. these are people who were living and breathing, and i am accusing people of murder. and if i can't bring the goods to the table, i have no book.

so i spent a couple of months in dark depression and finally decided, it's over. i can't do this. so i'm a meticulous researcher, and when i'm done with a project, i catalog all of my stuff because you never know when -- now i scan it into a database, but even just as recently as two years ago i was moving things into cartons and taking inventories. and i ended up coming across this envelope that had never been opened, it was postmarked from france. i opened it up, i was like, what is this? oh, yeah, yeah, i vaguely remember when i was in france -- i ended up going two or three times for france -- i remember, i'd ordered up these documents from the french national library, and as always happens, it's probably been like this for years, you order documents, and they come, you photographic reproductions of manuscripts or letters or books or illustrations, and it usually takes 6-8 weeks, and by that

time you've either forgotten why it was so important, or i was teaching at vanderbilt, and i never took a look at it. i open it up, and there's a letter written from a lawyer at parliament which is sort of the equivalent of the french supreme court in the 17th century in which he says this case is going to court, jean-baptiste denny has every reason to fear for his life. these two men, x and y, have killed before, they'll have no problem doing again. and these were guys whose names came up, um, from time to time in my research as being anti-circulators which meant they were against the idea of harvey's circulation. they also wrote some scathing treatises against circulation. so i went back to paris and spent another month digging around, pulling out letters and treatises and everything i could find, and it was the most glorious moment when i stumbled

across a treatise written by one of these two men, and i realize, you know, vigilantes are rarely shy, right? they wanted to stop transfusion, i just thesed to know who to look for and where in their stuff to look for, and they admitted it. in fact, one of them said, i'm a doctor, and we all know that doctors can kill. and his vendetta against baptiste was very clear. so i came back home, and i just couldn't believe what i had found. and i couldn't be sure. i thought probably i was hallucinating because i was getting this close to telling my editor that, i'm sorry, i'm a loser. and finally, when i was absolutely sure that i found it, i couldn't stand it. got in the car, said i'm going to go to the gym, i'm going to work out. called my husband, and i started to cry and said, i did it. what are you talking about? i found them, i found the killers. what are you talking about? [laughter] you know that murder that took place in 1667?

i know who did it. and he laughed and goes, oh, my god, you just solved a 3 or 400-year-old cold case. and that's when those moments of discovery, they are nail-biting, they make you sick to your stomach, you don't know you're going to come up with it, and it's just by stroke of sheer luck -- have you had those moments before? >> yes, but mine are never in france. [laughter] >> oh -- [speaking french] >> i just want to make one quick question for doug and deb had to deal with new york accepts, but you two -- accents, but you two were working in french, are you both, obviously, you as a professor, i hope you're fluent, but, doug, that's a side of you that's unknown to me. >> i've been outed. mitt romney and i both speak french. [laughter]

>> we're going to open up for questions. i did want to ask as a journalist, i'm very jealous because these are great books. best of breed among science writing. and they do something that i'm really struck by, they tell stories. and holly's particularly, you had this idea that you're in 19th sent -- 17th century france. and you certainly think you're in new york, and you're in rural france with doug's book. want to speak briefly about the narrative of how you turned these into real stories rather than just straight reporting? and i'm assuming it's consciously done. >> well, i had in my mind agatha christie when i wrote my book. and she was, actually, the early agatha christie's where she has very clever, intricate, devious, calculating poison killings were one of the things i was thinking about when i wrote the book. so i wanted it to be in the new york city of the 1920s. i wanted people l to feel like

they were there. so when you actually read the book, there's a lot of description of people on the streets, what they're wearing, what they're drinking, what the music's like, what -- and also it's a real privilege to write about early 20th century chemistry because it was, people called it wet chemistry rather than the dry chemistry of the day. you go into a laboratory, and there's bunson burners and things hissing on beakers, and all of these poisons turn these fantastic colors in the laboratories of yore, right? cyanide will turn this beautiful evening sky blue if you test it p properly. arsenic turns this gorgeous peacock and green. you can see how much i like this stuff. and carbon monoxide is like siren red in a test tube, and it'll stay that way for months. i mean, it's t most stubborn, determined, fascinating poison. so within --

[laughter] i sound awful. within the background i've got these two scientists, and they're surrounded by death and murder, and they're trying to figure it out, how to do this. so when i was doing the narrative structure of my story, it was complicated because i wanted to do two things. i wanted to move you through this, what is a quest? as holly says, a quest to change the world innocence. but i wanted to move you through the 1920s, and i want to move you through poisons. so in 1918 it's the wood alcohol chapter, and 1922 is an arsenic chapter, and it starts with a mysterious killing at a restaurant. and i keep -- and so i'm running these two narratives, the narrative arc of these two scientists trying to build something and the narrative arc of poisons as we try to understand them. and as a writer you're doing this complicated thing, i'm telling the story of arsenic, i'm telling the story of alexander getler who was the

chemist, i'm telling the story of charles norris who was the crusading first medical examiner in new york city. when do i bring them together? you know, when does one illuminate the other? and how do i do this so that when i'm telling you how arsenic killed someone, the story doesn't just stop? it has to keep moving forward in their story. and that's a wonderful challenge for a writer. and when i finished the book and i thought, oh, my god, i head this work, right? you have this moment where right to the end of the book you're thinking, can i pull this off? can i weave all these strands together into this story and keep it moving forward? it's the most amazing feeling when you -- not that you then don't have to rewrite it multiple times, but that first realization that you've pulled together these impossible, different strands of story and it's just your story, right? no one else has told the story that way. that's an amazing feeling as a writer. >> one thing i would say is that

reading other people's work makes all the difference and outlining it. i've actually outlined deb ice poisoner's handbook because i wanted to see the inner workings of how it all came together. on my desk there were two or three books that when i needed inspiration or whatever, i would just read a chapter or two and listen to the voice, take it apart, figuring out sentence, okay, right now i'm going to be looking at how does this author create narrative suspense by sentence length, right? and that seems to me to be one of the best things you do. for blood work the opening chapters, strangely, -- strangey enough, you'll see influences of sea biscuit and also eric larcenyson's devil in a white city. and debbie applegate's most famous man in america about the scandal of henry beecher stowe. and they're all in movement, on a train or whatever. and my guy is in movement.

and what you do is you look at the work of really good writers, and i'm sitting with two outstanding examples of them, and you take what you can learn from them. >> yes. >> briefly because i know we want to leave time for questions, i wanted to write a historic scientific thriller even though it harks to the modern era, so i took the structure of two strands and leave them hanging each time and going back and forth, and each time a chapters you go, oh, no. until the end of the book when i hope you say, no, i don't want it to end. we'll see. [laughter] and then the other thing i would say that we all do is you research ma knewically. if you want to bring something alive, you have to have every bit of it real. and it's hard work. and we know thousands and thousands of details that we didn't get to put in our books because that would clutter it, but we know them, and when you read these three books, you think that's true, and it's

because they are and that's how we work. >> let's take some questions. we have microphones set up in the two aisles if you want to step up to the mic and introduce yourself and can is ask a question of our authors. while waiting for people to come up, i remind you that there's both doug and holly will be back on stage this afternoon for those of you who are here in tucson. they're going to be doing a workshop on this very subject of how you write historical novels and do research and combine it into a form that's readable and enjoyable. and then deb will be back tomorrow afternoon in a session called "the best of science writing" which she and carler will be talking about the anthology of the same title. is there any questions we can -- yes. >> [inaudible] [laughter] >> i said so what about the nightmares in. >> okay. i have to edit this for tv. one of the things i did, i had all these autopsy reports, all these court records, all these

recollections. and when i was writing, i thought, well, i could describe scientifically what an autopsy looks like, but really can i describe it? so the doctor found ming? called the medical institute of lyon, and i got to know the directors. and one day in an offhanded way i said would you ever let me consider sitting in on a criminal autopsy? he said give me a number when you're in france, and i'll give you a ring. one early morning he said, come on down, we've got a couple for you. and it was quite horrible because it's not a hospital autopsy. one was a woman, had committed suicide with a shotgun, and the other was a body that had been sitting outside for six weeks and was quite, quite rotted. which was helpful because the big case for the doctor involved a case in which a body was really quite far gone. and in the book i describe quite precisely what such a thing looks and smells like. just a little cultural thing here, i was kind of horrified. and as holly knows, in french culture when you're upset, it's

not appropriate to show it. you're supposed to keep cool. and they knew this, too, so the doctor would say, oh, come, look inside the head. you see that particle of whatever? sort of testing me. and it would make me gnaw us -- nauseous, what i was trying to do was catch my breath. so that caused a nightmare. and then some to have details did. at one point i woke up and thought the killer was standing at the foot of my bed which is uncomfortable. [laughter] >> so my nightmare was that someone, well, first, that someone would read my book and try to kill someone. and this came up constantly. people would ask me this, when i was researching the book, i'd go to parties, and people would say what are you working on? be i would say, well, i'm working on a poisoner's handbook, and they'd say, well, how would you kill someone? [laughter] or what's your favorite poison, deborah? and i called my editor -- i was

always calling my editor in angst. but i called my editor, i said people are asking me how to kill someone. i actually had someone from the hemlock society come up to me and ask me what my preferred, you know, choice of death by poison would be. and she said never answer that question, right? i mean, penguin press does not want you to tell anyone how to kill someone. [laughter] by poison. and then once i was, when i was doing the kind of obsessive research that doug was talking about, i actually realized that i had recipes where i could go to the grocery store, assemble a few handy household ingredients and really put together some terrible things, right? and i called my editor -- she's like, don't call me, deborah. quit calling me about these poisons. [laughter] i said i know how to headache this poison in my kitchen. and she said don't put that in the book either. [laughter] >> what do you say about your

husband? i've heard you say this -- >> well, when i first started working on the book, and our house still is full of books about poison, right? i mean, libraries of strychnine and arsenic and cyanide and all kinds of different books about poison. and he looks at me, i'm surrounded by these, and he goes everyone's going to know that you did it. [laughter] >> deborah was at the authors' table last night. >> i was. >> was there anyone p apprehensive that moved away from you? >> just moved their glasses. people do that all the time. my husband does not have coffee with me in the morning. he pour himself a cup of coffee and goes and drinks it in another room. [laughter] wrong somehow. >> we have a question up here. >> well, daily we read stories this the newspaper, we see things on tv and on the computer, and they're stories that fall into the category that you're talking about, you know, how did this happen, who did it,

what's happening here? and it's very interesting to sort of get on the trail of someone and something, some event. and i'm just curious how do you choose a topic? what is your way? what trail do you research? you're obviously interested in poison -- [laughter] but generally speaking, you know? it's just a question that comes to mind. >> mine's, i mean, i've written about other things besides poison. the book i'm working on now is about poisonous food. [laughter] really no one ever will dine with me again. but i start with the idea. i mean, i usually, i usually start with the idea, this is a fascinating idea, right? how can i tell that? how can i make that into a story? and because i'm a science writer, i tend to think about it very sub subversively. i'll say people are afraid of science, many of them. or they, you know, went through school and came out thinking it

was boring, or they went through school and came owl out thinking science wasn't important in their daily life. how do i write a story that's such a good story and weave the science through it so that they, you know, just read the story, and the science kind of comes behind that. so i'll think about that a lot. what's the story that would make that work for me? >> i think for for me it's finding something that i can live with for a couple l of years because you do have to enter into this universe, but also why is this story important, what does it matter? what does it tell us about our own day? and for me this odd history of the first blood transfusions got at a core of debates and discussion we're having still right now. i think this story of really blood transfusions helps us ask two or three questions. the first is what's the relationship between science and society, and how comfortably do we sit with one another? and the second question is at

any given time, at any given moment a scientific revolution -- i think we are right now in our own moment of scientific revolution -- how far will society let science go, and at what costs and to what benefit? and then i think the delicious thing for me as somebody who works in history and who also teaches at a university, and my job is not to tell my students what to think but rather ask questions that allow them to extheir own stance on things is how will history judge us, 50, 10050 years later? we're looking at these blood transfusions saying, well, why was it such a problem then? well, we're also looking at things like genomic research, stem cell research, an pal hybrids, animal/human hybrids in labs, etc. , and i sense that many of the same questions i'm asking in blood work are precisely the ones we're struggling with right now.

and it's delicious to me to be able to take this very early case and to be able to use it as i've traveled and talked to different groups of people, to use that as almost like a safe space for us to talk about these issues in ways that are not so ideologically driven where everybody's starting with their very, you know, their core issue and not being able to talk. it's actually very comforting to me. many of the same things -- they should do it. boyle said, i don't think we're going to be able to by putting the blood of a furry beith beast into that of a feathery beast we're going to create a new species, but we really should try it out. these questions that we're digging up allow us to talk coherently and, i think, respectfully by using history as a case study. and that, for me, is my job as a faculty member. >> yeah, i agree with deb and holly on the way we get ideas. i ls also do the vacuum cleaner technique.

i'll get obsessed with something, and i'll talk to everybody, and as i pull on this little piece of string, it gets longer and longer and doesn't fall apart. and just on the thing these guys were addressing about science, i really believe that the scientific endeavor is an attempt to find an objective truth and be reality-based which especially in this period where that's being challenged i think it's important to write about that. so these stories are very compelling to me. >> again, i have great admiration for these three authors because they've actually taken subjects that are so new and unusual. in my case, i used to have a book idea, and i'd go down to barnes & noble and find there were three books on the remainder table on the same subject. [laughter] these guys went out and actually wrote something brand new, and i think that's really remarkable today. do we have time for one more question if anyone has any other questions or any closing thoughts you'd like to impart?

doug? >> well -- no, go ahead. deb, you go first. well, again, this notion of scientific literacy, i think, is very important. and deb and holly and i what we're doing when we create narrative, it's like two strands of dna. one is the fascinating narrative story, and the other strand is the science that weaves through it. one strand without the other is not interesting. the story by itself would come across as thin, yet one more mystery. and the science by itself would come across as dry. but if you have a compelling narrative and fascinating characters as we were able to find, thoroughly researched, you have this fascinating story of a story that's something bigger than the story itself. it's emblematic of something. and the other thing is as you can tell, we don't see science in a geeky kind of way. we see it as part of the human endeavor. it's a lens through which to see humans seeking. and i think it's a notable quest

whether it's populated by sometimes corrupt people, sometimes noble people, sometimes mixed people, it's a fascinating story to all of us. >> i was really going to say something on a similar line which is about the fact that all three of us write about science as something that people do. it's just something that people do. people who are trying to understand the world. and i think that's really important for writers like ourselves to portray science in that very human sense. for a long time people wrote about science as if it was somehow on some higher plane, done by people smarter than you. and we all know spending time in science that science is really just about people trying to understand the world. and fumbling their way through it quite often and making mistakes and learning from their mistakes. and in each of our stories you would see that human desire to make sense of the world around us that transcends history because that's exactly what

we're still trying to do today. >> um, and i actually think, jim, it's really great that you brought the three of us in each working in different time periods because, um, there are very clear commonalities in each of the stories, but they are also historically grounded in their own moment. and the thing that fascinates me most about the scientific endeavor if that's what we want to call it is that at any given time there are certain world views that dominate, paradigms that make certain questions possible to ask and others unthinkable. we just don't think to ask them before, um, circulation people would have never even imagined the idea of blood transfusion. and essentially what happens is the lens through which we see the world necessarily dictates the questions we can ask which then necessarily dictates the answers that we can get. and that fascinates me by saying where are we right now, what are our askable