On Thursday, September 23rd at 4:00pm PDT Warwick's will host Bill Schutt as he discusses his new book, Pump: A Natural History of the Heart, in conversation with Tiffany Fox. Bill Schutt is a vertebrate zoologist and author of five nonfiction and fiction books, including the New York Times Editor's Choice, Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History. Recently retired from his post as professor of biology at LIU Post, he is a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, where he has studied bats all over the world. His research has been featured in Natural History magazine as well as in the New York Times, Newsday, the Economist, and Discover.
Millennia ago, when we first began puzzling over the mysteries of the human body, one organ stood out as vital. The heart was warm, it was central, and it moved as it pumped blood. The ancient Egyptians treated it with reverence, mummifying it separately from the body so that the soul inside it could be weighed. Aristotle believed that it was the seat of consciousness. Over the centuries, science has dispelled the myths, but our fascination with the heart has endured.
From the origins of circulation, still evident in some microorganisms today, to the enormous hearts of blue whales, we journey with Bill to beaches where horseshoe crabs are being harvested for their life-saving blood, and under the sea to learn about the world's most natural antifreeze, flowing through the veins of icefish. And we follow him through human history, too, as scientists hypothesize wrongly and rightly about what is arguably our most important organ, ultimately developing the technologies that have helped us study the heart - and now, in the most cutting-edge labs, the tools that will help us regenerate it.
Deeply researched and engagingly told, Pump is a fascinating natural history sure to be loved by readers of Mary Roach and Bill Bryson.
Tiffany Fox is Director of Communications at UC San Diego Department of Surgery, as well as an award-winning public speaker. For more than a decade she has helped researchers tell their research stories through articles, videos and public presentations. She writes a weekly newsletter on research communications, Research Refined. Prior to coming to UC San Diego, Fox was a reporter and columnist for the San Diego Union-Tribune for 10 years. She is a freelance journalist and has written about a multitude of topics spanning science, engineering, technology and the arts. She has also traveled to five continents, is a certified yoga teacher, served in Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer and is a mother of two.
